Darkness Bound (32 page)

Leigh took a while to respond. “Why me?”

“You’ll find out. We’re at Gabriel’s.”

L
EIGH AND
N
ILES
had to pound on the doors at Gabriel’s to be let in. Once inside, quiet but intense activity met them.

The lights were very low, except for a few lamps shining on a supine body atop two tables that had been pushed together. Paint cans—more than Leigh had ever seen in one place, except a DIY store—littered the floor.

Gabriel paced, pausing to look at the table at each pass. He still had his coat and snow pants on, and a checked wool cap with woolly ear flaps turned up.

Talking in a low voice, Sally hovered over the patient.

With Niles beside her, Leigh made a hurried path through the paint cans to the table. The patient was Phoebe Harris from the bookshop—a very pale, scratched, and bruised Phoebe Harris. Her bright red hair contrasted frighteningly with her white skin, and frothed out around her head in curls that reached the edges of the table.

“What’s happened?” Leigh said. She composed her
self. “Did you have a fall?” If she showed how shocked she was, it wouldn’t help Phoebe.

“She’s not saying much,” Sally said from the other side of the tables. “She was when I got here but now she’s quiet.” Movement across the room caught Sally’s eye. “Saul! Thank goodness you’re here.” She looked past Leigh at the doctor, who glided toward them.

Leigh saw an unexpected movement up by the ceiling. A shaft of purple coiled from between the beams and shot toward a table.

Percy
.

He looked at Leigh, shook his head, and pointed toward the back of the room. She followed his pointing finger but couldn’t see anything different.

When she looked back at Percy, the fae creature disappeared.

Saul pulled off his long coat and covered Phoebe, feeling for her pulse, looking into her eyes. “Light the fire. She’s going into shock.”

The fire was already laid and Gabriel quickly went to work to get flames shooting up the chimney.

Phoebe’s teeth chattered loudly and Sally spread a thick, soft blanket over Saul’s coat. Where the blanket came from, Leigh didn’t know, but she was learning not to question as much as she once had.

Phoebe moaned and tossed her head from side to side. Her green eyes opened but the lids looked heavy. Saul had his hands on her shoulders and he looked into her face as if he could see inside her somehow.

He moved to check for injuries and knocked over several paint cans. They turned over and rolled around. Saul’s expression didn’t change from complete absorption in his patient.

“What’s with the damn paint?” Niles hissed toward Gabriel.

“I’m going to paint the logs inside,” he said.

Leigh caught his arm. “Why? You love the bare wood. We all do.”

“Molly doesn’t. Never did.”

“Molly’s gone,” Leigh said before she could stop herself.

The sadness on Gabriel’s face made her want to kick herself.

“We talk on the phone,” he said. “When it’s all done I’ll surprise her. There’s too much of this stuff to store at my place so I brought it here. It was in my truck. Just as well I did. When I went out of here for the last batch of cans, Phoebe was curled up on the doorstep.”

Cliff Ames came from the kitchens carefully carrying a steaming cup of something. Silently they watched while the cook, whose eyes darted anxiously about, set down the cup and left.

At the same time, Sean slipped into the bar, apparently from the delivery door at the back. He went at once to Phoebe. The sudden transformation of his expression from just curious to involved puzzled Leigh.

“When?” Niles said. “When did you find Phoebe?”

“An hour ago,” Gabriel said, shrugging. “Four, four-thirty.”

Niles gave him a disbelieving stare. “That’s when you decided to come over with about a thousand cans of paint?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Gabriel said.

Leigh looked at her boss and saw the deep purple beneath his eyes.

Gabriel shook his head and heaved a heavy sigh. “I know where Molly is,” he said. Leigh expected him to continue, but he only started moving paint cans out of the middle of the bar, shoving them wherever there was a space on the floor no one was likely to use soon.

“Listen to me, Phoebe,” Saul said, drawing everyone’s attention back to the tables. Without his coat he wore one of the full-sleeved white shirts he favored with black pants. He had wide shoulders and narrow hips, and Leigh decided he was too thin.

Slowly, Phoebe focused on his face and, amazingly, she smiled.

“Keep looking at me,” Saul said. “Talk to me when you can.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Sean said. He touched one of her curls.

Saul glanced up and shook his head at the other man.

“I didn’t see them coming,” Phoebe said. “They… it was big. A big animal. It knocked me down and snarled in my face. I thought there were others back where I couldn’t quite see them. The one who attacked me got its claws in my hair.” She began to reach up with her left hand but cried out and took deep breaths. “My arm really hurts. I expect I’ve got big scratches on my head,” she said through her teeth.

Leigh didn’t allow herself to look at Niles, but his hand settled comfortably on the back of her neck.

Sally indicated the cup Cliff had left, looking to Saul for approval. He nodded and she lifted Phoebe’s head. The drink looked like tea but Leigh could smell brandy.

“Has she got a broken arm?” Niles asked.

Leigh turned her face up to him and recognized one
of his rare angry outbursts in the making. His lips made a hard, white line. On the back of her neck, his fingers dug in harder.

“No,” Saul said, looking hard at Niles. “A pull at the shoulder, I think. Perhaps partial dislocation. She’s going to be fine.”

“He had eyes that shone in the dark,” Phoebe said. “I was in my place at the bookshop. All the lights went off and I was dragged outside. I screamed but no one heard—no one who cared.” She gulped more of the spirits-laced tea and color started to return to her cheeks. “He threw me down. Every time I tried to get up, he threw me down again.” Her gazed settled on Leigh and didn’t move away.

“You aren’t alone anymore,” Leigh told her. “I’m sorry you were scared.”

“I went down to your cottage to see you about contacting your sister,” Phoebe all but whispered. “But you weren’t there. I waited, then drove back home. That creature came right after I got back.”

Saul, Leigh noted, held Phoebe’s arm just above the wrist. The look of pain was fading from her face.

“Holy… Who the hell is that?” Gabriel said.

A woman Leigh had never seen before stood at the end of the bar. She came forward a few steps, an arrogant curl on her bright red lips. Heavy makeup didn’t make her look ugly, just artificial. “Sally,” she said. “Where have you been? You don’t follow instructions too well, do you, girl? I’ve looked for you all over. Good thing I’ve found you now, by the looks of things.”

Saul turned to stare at the woman, who took a half-step backward and all but snarled at him. “Saul VanDoren. I should have known you’d be here.”

“Who is that?” Gabriel said again, this time more loudly. “Ma’am, do we know you?”

She swayed, moving the long skirts of a dark brown striped Victorian-style traveling dress. “Who cares if you know me—you don’t and won’t,” she told Gabriel. “I’m not here to see you. I could tell the kind of trouble people were getting into and the signs led me here.”

The woman looked at Phoebe and frowned. “Who is that creature?”

“You don’t need to know,” Saul said. His nostrils flared as if he smelled something he didn’t like. “Give her more tea, Sally, please.”

Sally did as she was told and managed to indicate to Leigh that she should come closer.

Leigh moved but Niles went with her as if they were fused together, and she smiled at him. Fused to Niles was exactly where she preferred to be. His hand clasped her waist possessively.

“Will you hold her shoulders for me?” Sally said.

Saul had moved in closer, too, and between them they more or less closed Phoebe off from this newcomer.

“Have you forgotten who you answer to, Sally?” the woman said, her voice grating. “It’s very unwise for you to ignore me. If you ever want to go back—”

“This is my old friend, Ms. Tarhazian,” Sally all but bellowed. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper only those gathered at the table could hear. “I want to get her out of here, but I dare not openly offend her.”

“Is she the Fae Queen?” Niles asked.

Sally nodded, and her complexion turned a little green.

“Percy was here, too,” Leigh said, ignoring the blank faces around her. “I think he wanted to warn us she was coming.”

Sean continued to rub Phoebe’s legs through the blanket and looked at her with something between fascination and adoration. This night—or morning—was getting too much for Leigh.

“Sally,” Tarhazian yelled. “I made myself clear to you, but you couldn’t manage to follow my orders. You’ve managed to mess everything up. Again. For that, you will pay.”

As silently as she had appeared, Tarhazian was gone. Leigh couldn’t tell if Sally felt relieved by her departure, or even more frightened at the threat. Before she could ask, Phoebe sat up, supported by Saul. “Leigh,” Phoebe said quietly but desperately. “Come close. You, too, Sally. All of you.

“I heard something, or I’m pretty sure I did,” she said to Leigh, who clutched Niles’s arm. “One of those animals called me, Leigh. Can you tell me why he would do that? I worried about you.”

Saul rested a hand on Phoebe’s cheek, and when he moved it to the other side of her face, Leigh was almost certain the bruises and scratches were fading rapidly.

“No, I don’t know,” Leigh told her.

“I think I do,” Niles muttered.

Abruptly Phoebe burst into tears. “That thing was a great big wolf,” she sobbed. “I didn’t say before, but he had another animal beside him the whole time, only he was a bit smaller. Kind of like a big dog.

“I think they were going to kidnap me until the smaller one got a good look at me. He made a wailing sound and the other one backed off. They howled in the darkness like there was a lot of them. And then they turned away as if I wasn’t there.”

“Thank God,” Gabriel said.

“I was glad,” Phoebe agreed. “But that one who attacked me thought I was someone else, another woman. I’m sure of it. They’re out there now looking for some poor woman they want to drag off into the forest. It really could be you, Leigh.”

Leigh felt Niles grow as still as a stone statue.

“We will be ready,” Saul said to Niles. “We have more power on our side and we will stand together.”

“Strange bedfellows,” Sean muttered.

W
ITH BROADENING
dawn, a cold, blue-gray light settled in. The impact of the heavy snowfall was startlingly visible on the laden boughs of trees, the tall white ridges on fences, the mountains of white that lined the road. Hardly a naked twig showed to break the flat, white margins of the world.

Leigh’s Honda ground along on chains that didn’t completely reach through the icy coating beneath the snow. So few cars had come this way that she and Niles made mostly fresh tracks.

The heater wasn’t working well and on the backseat, Skillywidden had curled up on top of Jazzy. Jazzy hated the car even more than he used to and the addition of cold left him shivering and snuffling, and rolling his eyes at Leigh each time he had a chance.

“Sean wasn’t leaving Phoebe no matter what anyone else thought,” Leigh said. She glanced at Niles.

Niles nodded. “That was one instant case of magnetism—at least on his side.”

“Phoebe isn’t well and it shows,” Leigh said. “But I can understand the attraction. She’s vibrant and interesting. I think Sean would be drawn to that. He’s reserved but he’s on top of everything in that quiet way of his. Sometimes he makes me laugh. He says things I don’t expect.”

“Are you trying to make me jealous?” Niles stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I don’t know if I can bear having you admire another man.”

“Just you, huh?” she said. “How do you plan to make sure I don’t admire anyone else? This ought to be good.”

“Give me a hint. What kind of answer do I give to that?”

She shrugged, turning on the windshield wipers to sweep aside a small avalanche from the roof of the car. “Feats of strength, maybe. Dancing exhibitions, singing opera. I prefer ballet, by the way. Gourmet meals you cooked yourself.” Rolling in her lips, controlling a grin, she gave herself a second before she said, “Mind-bending lovemaking. Luscious, lustful sex in every place in every way, every day—maybe several times a day.”

As he watched her, a sly smile parted his lips.