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Harlow stood beside the counter, wearing nothing but his borrowed track pants from yesterday, Looking for all the world like nothing had happened.
She grabbed his arm and squeezed. He felt real enough, and not at all like a hallucination. Then again, if she was hallucinating, it wouldn't be so much a stretch from seeing and hearing Harlow to thinking she could feel him, too.
"What happened last night? Where did you go?" she demanded.
He hung his head. "I'm sorry about that. I meant to take you to Hooghly Town, but I got distracted by the cemetery, and then the sun came up and I was stuck."
"Stuck."
"It's a gargoyle thing. When we're exposed to direct sunlight, we turn to stone, like a statue on a roof. We can't move or speak again until we're out of the sun, or the sun goes down."
So now she wasn't just imagining a guy in a gargoyle suit, but an actual gargoyle? She'd been reading too many of Callie's monster romances.
"Right..."
"We can go again once we're finished with...whatever you need my help with here, if you want," he said.
"After I'm done cleaning up here, I'm going home to get some sleep. I probably need it, if I'm calling up monsters from my subconscious to help with the cleaning. I would have thought woodland creatures would be more...appropriate..." Octavia had to suppress a snort. Woodland creatures only worked for princesses, and Rory was adamant that none of them were princesses. She evidently hadn't watchedThe Princess and the Frogyet, then. Maybe on the weekend...
"What can I do to help?" Harlow asked.
A man volunteering to do cleaning. That wasn't an offer Octavia was about to turn down, hallucination or not. "Well, if you could start dealing with the broken glass upstairs while I finish up here, then I can come up and mop the floor. Uh, and I need to find something to board the window up with, until I can get someone out to repair it."
"Yes, ma'am." Harlow headed upstairs.
Of course she'd hallucinated a man whose arse looked amazing in track pants.
Octavia shook her head, and got back to work.
NINE
When the sun finally set, Harlow had headed back to the house to offer his apologies to Octavia for deserting her, and not answering her calls, only to find that she wasn't home. Worse, Grant and Wystan had taken up residence on the roof, like big ugly cockerels, so he'd darted into the walls of the ruined cottage further down the hill to wait for Octavia's return.
She'd been busy with her family in the house for several hours, so he'd waited, distracted by the small ginger cat hunting rats in the palm trees. He'd never seen such an efficient killer. One, two, three, four...the cat soon had a row of corpses laid out before the front steps of the cottage, and she showed no signs of slowing the carnage.
Help me.
Harlow could not resist the siren call of Octavia's voice, but he didn't want to, either. Only this time, she sped off in her car without him, leaving him to follow the red glow of her rear lights from the air.
She headed for the café where they'd first met last night, only she wasn't alone. Two police officers were present, investigating what appeared to be a break in at the café.
Harlow slipped between the walls, watching and listening. The police believed the attack was personal, while Octavia seemed to think the motive was merely theft. Reducing glass to powder, though...that took effort, even for a man with stone fists. For a normal man...that kind of damage took a fair amount of rage. And if someone who would do that to a cabinet was after Octavia, Harlow would protect her, no matter what. Let the bastard fight a man his own size, instead of preying on helpless women. Or even capable women.
Finally, the police left, and Harlow dared to step out into the café where Octavia could see him.
"Can I help with anything?" he asked. She had asked for help, after all, and in the absence of an attacker to pummel, he might as well be of some use.
She sent him upstairs, where he'd seen more glass from the broken window. Picking up the pieces was easy, for glass was no match for his living stone skin, but finding something to mend the window took longer. He found a packing crate that was about the right size, and proceeded to take it apart, before putting it back together again in a shutter the same size as the window. He'd just finished nailing it in place when Octavia came up the stairs, carrying a mop and bucket.
"Wow," was all she said.
"Where would you like me to put this?" he asked, holding out the bucket of broken glass he'd collected.
She grabbed it out of his hands. "I'll take that. You finish what you were doing with the window."
He was indeed finished by the time she returned, so he'd started mopping the floor.
"You don't need to..." she began. Then she sighed. "I want to believe you're real, but all this is too perfect. You have to be a hallucination, because only an imaginary man could possibly..." She waved her hand up and down, trying to convey something she didn't have the words for.
