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“You need to talk to Demetrius,” Tim told Henri darkly.
“Demetrius was sitting right here, I don’t need to tell him anything,” Henri replied, but his scent and tone conveyed he was annoyed and exasperated in theshit I am not in the mood to deal withway. Which he smelled like most of the time. His daughter, still on his hip, turned her head to look over his shoulder.
Pups learnedveryfast when to ignore the adults.
Tim said, “An apology would be a good start.”
Henri provided some classic advice. “Stay out of it.”
“I was raised better than that. Were you?” Tim shot back. “Want to bet what’s going to happen next?”
“Not particularly.”
“Exactly. Go ahead, keep staying out of it. But I won’t. So you stay out ofthat, because I havehadit.” Tim walked back to the table to finish clearing it.
So they were doing the in-person version of vaguebooking. Emily bumped me out of the way of the sink. “You’ve been washing the same dish for five minutes. Get another cup of coffee. I’d tell you to get some sun, but you’re already pretty tan.”
I looked at my forearm. I had turned a sort of scalded bronze shade. My longish-sleeves covered my scar, which was pretty ugly with how the fleshy pink hadn’t tanned and sat like a puke-trench on my skin.
I obeyed and got a cup of coffee, and went outside to contemplate Gaia’s Spectacularly Uncaring Wheel. The spring morning was already softly warm—promising the later day would be hot—and smelled amazing. Green and lush and warm dirt. The sky was a deep, gorgeous blue punctured by puffy white clouds. A strong wind blew down off the hills, bending the trees over to show silvery-green leafy underbellies.
A shadow moved on the grass down the hillside. A few vague proddings of curiosity got the better of me and I headed down the hill for a better look.
Apuppy? No, several puppies. In a pile.
Two gray-silver. One brown.
I stopped dead halfway to them.
Shook my head.
Still there.
Shook my head again.
Gone.
I turned, walked back up the hill, and headed into the house.
Nope. I wasnotdoing visions today. Gaia could come back tomorrow.
The kitchen was still busy with the final clean-up. The scent in the foyer told me Searle had left for the feed mill. I took my cold coffee down into the archives to sort mail.
The necklace box—with necklace—was on the drafting table.
“Marcella wants us to keep it down here,” MaryAnne said while she wrote notes.
I sat down in my usual chair and stared at the basket of mail.
No matter how much time there’d been, it wouldn’t have been enough. It probably would have been his last chance to say goodbye. So he’d said goodbye, and we hadn’t done the long, drawn-out agony of bytes and texts. Maybe it was better this way. I’d already stolen more than AmberHowl actually knew.
It still hurt.
I contemplated the crystal spear. A very thin strip of gold and a very tiny hinge split the spear into a bottom three-quarters and a top quarter. But the odd thing was that it wasn’t two strips of gold with a shadow between them—like the lid of a sealed box. It was a single strip of gold with a hinge over it. So was the hinge just decorative and not functional, and the very fine gold band had been set perfectly into a groove carved into the crystal surface?
I spent half an hour trying to open it. Everything from popping the top like a candy dispenser to wedging my fingernails into the groove to flat-out trying to snap it, and it didn’t budge.
I tucked it into my bra to warm it up, because pure gold is so soft, then tried to open it (nope), or poke the gold hinge with a letter opener to pry it off. Didn’t deform or dent at all. Which meant it wasn’t pure gold, or it was some kind of creepyenchantedgold.
