Page 71 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“I see them. It’s the dark bits that separate the artists from the hacks.”

Ermengarde swept past trailing something that might have been fog. Aidan appeared at Garrick’s elbow, red-headed and enormous, and clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to move most males.

“Look at you. Out among the people. Someone’s been domesticated.” He caught her eye, clearly delighted with himself, then turned the full easy warmth of his smile on the grandparents. “You must be Toby’s people. He’s the best kid in this whole town, and I’ve met all of them.”

Lawton ate it up. Cornelia thawed a careful degree.

Then Robin came out of the crowd with Birdie on her hip, and Cornelia got the look. Robin was small and rumpled and losing a fight. Birdie had been dressed as a bee and had strong feelings about it, and the top half of the knitted costume had already come off. Eric sauntered along behind his mate carrying the discarded yellow-and-black sweater with the small attached wings with the resigned dignity of a soldier holding somebody’s purse.

“She won’t keep the wings on,” Robin announced, to the group at large. “I made those wings. Do you know how long a bee wing takes to knit?”

“You might as well give me the rest of it,” Eric said.

Cornelia watched an Alpha’s son stuff a knitted bee thorax into his pocket, and her expression changed. It wasn’t disdain, exactly. It was the look of a woman discovering that the dangerous-looking male in the leather jacket carried a baby’s wings and nobody thought a thing of it. That her grandson was growing up somewhere the rules were entirely, alarmingly different from her own.

Sara and Ben found them at the cider stand. Sara warm and curvy and immediately bending down to Toby’s level to admire his wings, Ben six and a half feet of silver rabbit Other with his ears back and his arms crossed, softening only when Sara touched his sleeve. Toby’s kindergarten teacher and the least sociable tavern keeper in four counties. Cornelia took a long breath.

And then Flora arrived, petite and pale green and grinning, in a magenta tracksuit that read GHOUL’S NIGHT OUT across the seat. She planted herself squarely in front of Maris with the air of a female collecting on a bet nobody knew they’d made.

“I see you brought the whole circus.” Flora’s eyes swept over the grandparents, weighed them and found them wanting. “You’ll be the Charleston lot. He’s got Jefferson’s chin, poor thing.”

Cornelia blinked at the name.

“You knew Jefferson?”

“No.”

Flora drew Maris aside before Cornelia could ask any more questions. “They’re staying at the Inn. I’ve put them in the blue room at the back. They’ll want their rest. Before they say whatever it is they’ve driven four hours to say.”

“What makes you think they’ve come to say anything?”

Flora’s sharp eyes went to Cornelia’s camel coat. “The coat,” she said, and disappeared into the crowd.

“Mama!” Toby, tugging her hand, wings bouncing. “It’s time, it’s the contest, Mr. Garrick said I have to go stand with the other kids. Will you watch, will you watch⁠—”

“I’m watching,” she said. Her voice came out thick. “I’m always watching, baby. Go.”

He went, cardboard wings and all, up onto the little stage under the orange lights, and stood in a row of tiny witches and one determined tomato. Then Houston’s amplified voice boomed and what have we HERE, and Toby turned round and spread his homemade grey wings as wide as his arms would go, and the crowd roared. And Garrick, who did not make sounds in crowds, who held himself still as a post in front of people, made a sound Maris had never heard him make.

He was laughing. Low and stunned and helpless, gold flaring hot in his grey eyes as he watched a five-year-old in cardboard be exactly, gloriously, publicly him.

Cornelia watched Garrick laugh, her expression unreadable, but Maris suspected she’d just realized exactly what Toby had done when he’d chosen his own wings.

The reckoning came at the Inn, afterwards.

They walked Toby back in the dark, sugar-crashed and boneless. He was asleep against Garrick’s chest before they left the square, one cardboard wing crushed flat, and neither of them had the heart to fix it. Flora had the room ready and a warm light in the window and the good grace, for once, to make herself scarce.

Garrick gently laid Toby down on the trundle bed in the grandparents’ suite. Then he stepped back and said he’d wait in the truck to run Maris home. He looked at her silently for one second before he left—I’m right outside—and it steadied her more than she wanted to admit.

Then it was the three of them and a sleeping boy and a decanter of port Lawton had brought from Charleston. He poured them each a glass before Cornelia took over.

“Maris,” Cornelia said, “please sit. There’s something we’d like to put to you.”

Just as Flora had predicted.

“We’ve been talking, Lawton and I.” Cornelia leaned forward and gave her an earnest look. She was very good at this. “About Tobias. About his future. And before you say anything—please. Let me finish, and know that every word of it comes from love.”

“I know it does.”