Kipa paused. I could practically see the wheels turning in his head. “Do you think that whatever it is realized you knew about it?”
“I have my suspicions, but I don’t know for sure.”
Kipa pulled his hair back into a ponytail and held it fast with a hair tie. He leaned back in his chair, staring at me with a contemplative look. He was truly gorgeous. We had said the “L” word a couple months back, but now and then it occurred to me that falling in love with a god was fraught with landmines. He was immortal, and while I was Ante-Fae, that didn’t mean I’d live forever. But I also reminded myself that he had spent decades with a human woman he had fallen in love with, and he stayed by her side until she died. And that…that was the story that had made me admit to myself that I was in love with him.
“I have a thought,” he said. “What if the attachment is what attacked you last night?”
I shook my head. I had been so tired that the thought had never crossed my mind. But the moment he said it, I could feel an alarm going off inside. “Fuck. Fuck me hard.”
“Glad to oblige, love, but what do you think about my idea?” He was still grinning, but his eyes told me he was taking this completely seriously.
“You may have something there. I don’t want to believe it because that means that Lenny’s creature is onto me and managed to find out where I live. Being stalked by an astral creature—if that’s what it is—isn’t my idea of fun.”
“Neither is being killed by one,” Kipa said, his smile vanishing. “We have to find out what that thing is so we know how to deal with it.” He paused. “Before we go, we need to beef up the wards so that Raj is protected. Although he seemed to hold his own last night.”
“True, but we can’t take a chance on the hope that he can do that again. He seems to have no control over the power. We can’t rely on it and if anything happened to him, I’d never forgive myself.” I glanced at the clock. “Crap, I need to feed the ferrets—”
“Already done. While you were sleeping. But you should run in and say hello to them. Elise seems to be feeling neglected. I’ll clean up while you do that, and then we’ll head over to Quest’s place. Make sure you’re dressed for walking through the snowy woods. My friend in Annwn lives in a cottage on the edge of Thicklewood.”
I’d never heard of Thicklewood. I knew all about Cernunnos’s palace, and Y’Bain—the massive forest that spread through Annwn. I also had some knowledge of Brighid’s castle. But I had no experience with the lesser-known places.
I hurried down the hall and entered the ferrets’ room. I had three ferrets, except they weren’t really ferrets. They were human spirits who had been bound into ferret form when I tried to free them from a tree they had been trapped in. The spell had gone awry thanks to a curse placed on the tree. Ever since then, they had lived with me, sliding more into their ferret natures with each year that passed. They’d been with me since the 1980s, and I had no idea how long they would live, but until then, I would keep trying to find the spell that kept them trapped. In the end, though, even if I wasn’t able to free them, they’d eventually age and die, and that would free them to move on.
Elise, a beautiful white ferret, was the most aware. She always managed to keep hold of her core nature. Gordon was still trying, but he was having trouble maintaining his memories of his former life. Templeton was almost fully ferret now, and I didn’t hold hope that he would be able to talk to me much longer.
I let them out of their cage. Templeton meandered over for a few head scritches before heading back to curl up in his bedding for a nap. Gordon began to zoom around the room, bouncing off the walls and wrestling with toys. As usual, it was Elise who came over for me to pick her up. I set her on the table in front of me and stroked her back. She leaned into my touch, sighing happily.
I missed you the past few days.
“I’m sorry. I know I’ve been AWOL, but I hope you haven’t been too lonely.”
Actually, your mother spent some time with us yesterday. She’s a lovely…Bean Sidhe. I’ve always wondered about the Bean Sidhe. When I was alive, I used to study mythology, you know. I pictured hags—terrifying and reaper like.
“You haven’t seen my mother when she’s working,” I said with a laugh. “She’s not nearly as pleasant. When she goes into full Bean Sidhe mode, her shriek can kill. Anyway, I wanted to check in and see if everything’s okay.”
What was the commotion last night? I felt something in the house, but I couldn’t tell what it was. It frightened me. And I felt you were in danger but I couldn’t figure out a way to tell you.
I stared at her for a moment. That Elise had felt it too meant that the creature who attacked me was powerful. Elise wasn’t particularly psychic.
“You felt it?”
Yes, I did. So did Gordon and Templeton, but they weren’t easily able to verbalize what they felt. They huddled up near me and kept talking about “the monster.”
If the ferrets were all feeling what had attacked me, that meant it had a great deal of power and I had to make certain the house was warded. I took my responsibilities as protector for Raj and the ferrets seriously, and I couldn’t imagine someone hurting them because of my carelessness.
“All right, thank you for telling me. I’ll try to make certain the creature can’t return. I have to go, but I’ll try to spend some time in here tonight or tomorrow. I’d let you run around the house while we’re gone, but I don’t trust Raj not to accidentally step on you.”
I picked Elise up and cuddled her for a few moments, then shooed them back into their cage and secured the door. The entire back wall was one massive ferret complex so they had plenty of room to play inside the cage, and they had hidey-holes and a couple wheels to run on and space to be alone if they wanted to.
As I left the room, it occurred to me that if Kipa and I ever moved in together, we might want to buy a bigger house with a family room that I could turn into the ferrets’ sanctuary. Realizing what I was thinking, I tried to clear my thoughts. I wasn’t ready for a ring yet. Or a permanent roommate.
Chapter Eleven
Before we left, I looked through my ritual room, trying to find the most powerful wards I possessed. I thought I had installed the strongest ones to guard against Pandora, but on the off chance, I decided to look anyway. I was glad that I did because in the back of one of the altar cabinets where I stored all my spell components, I found a super-charged crystal that I had forgotten about. Fire and ice quartz—the spike was incredibly beautiful, with hundreds of fractures running inside the clear crystal. A multitude of prisms shimmered inside the spike.
I had charged it under a Black Moon a few years back, dedicating it to Arawn—the god of death, to whom I was pledged—and then put it away and promptly forgotten about it. But the crystal was still humming, and I realized that maybe sometimes we forgot we owned things to save them for a time when we’d need them more.
Carrying it out to the space in an étagère where I had arranged the spell grid for the wards, I added it to the center and immediately the energy of the house shifted. It was as though I had muffled the outer world, on both the physical and the magical levels.