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It was good.
Of course it was.
I started wondering if I could fit through the tiny round window at the end of the hall, when Ymsi thwarted my escape plans by picking me up and depositing me in front of the stairs. Where a cascade of apples he couldn’t reach had overflowed the floor design and were bump, bump, bumping down the steps alongside my feet. And where the pecan pods hung from actual branches, brushing my head as their produce erupted at me, like brown rain, and then rolled everywhere.
I somehow got downstairs without breaking my neck, and peered inside the kitchen door.
Yep.
That’s what I’d thought.
“Dory! You’re up!”
I was also halfway turned around and headed for the front door, but the desperation in Claire’s voice stopped me. Because her housekeeping frenzy wasn’t, as I’d supposed, due to irritation at Louis-Cesare, but to something else entirely. Something worse.
Something sitting at the kitchen table, perched on a stool with a cutting board in front of him, holding out a finger. “Dorina!” The lilting voice made my name sound like a cascade of bells. “Come and see. I am wounded.”
It was said with all the panache of a dying hero announcing a mortal blow.
I sighed and turned back around. “Hello, Caedmon.”
“Come,” he demanded. “Kiss it better.” He waggled the supposedly injured digit at me.
I sighed again and walked into the kitchen.
Most women would have been happy to kiss it, or anything else Caedmon chose to name. He was Claire’s soon-to-be father-in-law, but he didn’t look it. I don’t know how to adequately describe how he did look, because there’s simply no practical equivalent. We’re talking seven feet of finely muscled leanness; hair like actual sunlight, as in it glowed from within; eyes like genuine emeralds, deep green and glinting with an odd mix of wit and wisdom; and a face that would have been literally stunning if it wasn’t currently pouting like a child.
Or maybe not a child, I thought, as one side of those sculpted lips edged upward, barely a fraction of an inch. And yet miraculously changed the expression from sass to seduction. He waggled the finger at me again.
“Healing’s not really my specialty,” I told him, leaning against the table. “I’d only hurt it more.”
The not-smile edged up another tenth of an inch. “How much more?”
He sounded intrigued.
“Let me see your knife.”
“Dory!” Claire sounded a little shrill, like she was afraid we were going to duel it out right there in her kitchen. Which wasn’t likely, even if I’d been in any shape to take on a king of the Light Fey. Because where was the room?
The kitchen wasn’t as bad as my hallway, but there had been some . . . additions. Caedmon was king of what was known on Earth as the Blarestri, one of the three great houses of the Light Fey. It wasn’t their real name, of course—which we mere mortals weren’t good enough to have—just a placeholder meaning “the Blue Fey.” But it was descriptive of their realm, high in the mountain fastnesses of Faerie, with blue skies all around and lush greenery everywhere. Because nature loved Caedmon.
Literally, I thought, as a little vine tried to twine itself in his long, flowing hair.
“There, there,” he said absently, and pulled it out, to wind it around the back of a chair instead.
It had a lot of company.
Claire’s window-box garden, where she grew the herbs she used for cooking, had exploded, for lack of a better term. It was now a window jungle, one leaning not outward, toward what looked like late-afternoon sun, but inward, scrawling across sink and countertops and floor like a toddler’s drawing. And then climbing here, there, and everywhere, just to get a little closer to the glowing fey sitting at the table.
It wasn’t the only one. The bedraggled pot of begonias that Claire had brought inside and placed on top of the fridge had draped the appliance in dark green leaves. They were huge and healthy now, and framing clusters of crimson flowers that brushed the floor on either side. They made the old, dented fridge look like it was wearing a long red wig, one more luxurious than Claire’s currently frazzled locks.
“Stop it,” she muttered, as another mass suddenly plopped over the fridge front, like bangs, making the resemblance that much more startling.
&nb
sp; “What’s for dinner?” I asked, because priorities are priorities. And if I had to deal with Caedmon, I was going to need energy.
“Soup,” she said curtly, and then jumped when a spider plant, including pot, suddenly slammed in the screen door from the outside, pulling itself along on its weird little handlike protrusions, earthworming toward its god. “Oh, for—Dory!”
