Forest Moon Rising (36 page)

“Tess, I looked up your professor on the Internet,” he said. Was that a trace of guilt in his voice?

Every nerve ending in my body froze.

“There are a lot of holes in his profile.”

“I know.”

“Did you know he’s married?”

“Yes. He and Julia have been together since they were children, married quite young and stayed together.” Sort of.

“So there’s nothing between you?”

“Not anymore.”

“I’m guessing he was one of your mistakes, one of the reasons you want to go slowly in our relationship.”

I gathered my courage, as if preparing to face a demon in a full fight. “I’m over him.”

Liar!
Scrap sneered at me from somewhere else.

While Tess and the girls take Allie to the airport the next day, I scoot back to Cape Cod. I’ve postponed this trip longer than I should. Tess needed me close. Her psyche is fragile. Knowing that Damiri blood flows in her veins, no matter how dilute, preys upon her mind. It eats away at her sense of self. She doubts that she is the proper person to raise our daughters.

That’s right, they are my daughters too. And I won’t let Tess change her mind about raising them. Not that she could with that magic bond and all.

Tess needs to realign herself with her former life as a Celestial Blade Warrior. When I get back, we’ll do a little meditation so that she can connect with her friends at the Citadel.

As I hightail it through the chat room, I note that the Sasquatch are back on duty. They’ve kinda been quarantined since that little kerfuffle with a rogue portal underneath Donovan’s uncompleted casino at Half Moon Lake. Donovan lost a lot of money when we imploded his investment in order to close the portal.

He has recovered financially. I don’t know if his agenda was truly damaged or not.

Speaking of which, I wonder if he knows that Tess is Lady Lucia’s descendant. If he knows, that would explain his unrelenting pursuit of her as his ideal mate, the mother of the children he craves, the matriarch of his planned homeland for half-breed demons. The connection is another form of power. He thrives on power.

I land on the boundary of the two point five acres Tess used to own. She and her late husband, Dill—Doreen’s brother—bought this place for many reasons. The special energies of the place are particularly inviting. Calm, peace, security.

Since time out of mind, this plot of land is where treaties were signed, alliances negotiated. All welcome without prejudice. That invitation is stronger now that Dad and Bill run a B&B here. Actually, Bill owns it. Dad put it in his name for arcane tax reasons. And Bill has no demon blood in him, dilute or otherwise. Dad has a drop more than Tess but super recessive. He’s never even heard of the Warriors of the Celestial Blade.

The land has a Neutral owner once more.

Except...

Something eats away at the neutrality. I can peel threads of power out of the air around me. They come from every direction, every dimension. They twine together. They twist into arrows seeking a way of penetrating the boundaries of this dimension. They burrow upward. They spiral downward. Little bits here and there, not so much as to draw attention, unless you are looking for it.

They seek the crystal ball. It is a focus. It draws diverse strands of life together from this place and that.

A whiff of something elusive crosses my nose. I follow that thread as far as I can without going into the chat room.

I have smelled that particular odor before. Sort of imp. Sort of something else. Something older and rotting with insanity. There are cracks in the diamond we sent back to Faery. Energy leaks through those cracks.

The ball is funneling energy into the new dimension from every crack and crevice that no one thinks to shield. Like from the ring. That needs to stop. Who can control it? Who should be the one to claim that new dimension and shape it?

Not the Nörglein, that’s for sure.

I creep around to the sloping cellar door against the outside foundation. Overgrown shrubs hang in shielding blankets of intertwined branches over the door. The big oak crowned in mistletoe with a swing slung from the limbs in the yard shadows it. Even if the Powers That Be have set a watchdog here I do not believe they will notice me. Watchdogs get lazy if they are not challenged. The deal Tess signed in blood guarantees that unauthorized personnel cannot come here.

I’m not exactly authorized anymore. Just because I shouldn’t come back here doesn’t mean I can’t. Tess and I lived here almost three years. I know secrets about this place outsiders will never find.

If I pop into the chat room and back inside the cellar, the transition will alert someone. I need to be sneakier.

I flit from shadow to shadow watching and sniffing for any trace of observers. Ah, there in the oak hangs a bat, upside down with wings only partially wrapped around him. He’s awake. No self-respecting bat from Earth would show his face with the sun nearing high noon. It’s too small to be a Damiri. Must be someone else. Someone to be avoided.

The presence of a bat almost guarantees that Tess will stay away from here. She hates bats.

I fold the shifting light around me, circling with the wind like a fallen leaf—there are lots of those around. The bat ignores me when I land on the old slats of the door. There’s a gap between two of them, just a teensy bit wider than the others.

I squeeze through into the dank and moldy cellar.

Mold! Glorious mold. It permeates the dirt walls; it hides in the corners near the floor. And it tops the discarded jars of jelly Mom put up. Clearly Bill and Dad don’t clean down here like they should. They’ve moved the washer and dryer up to the attached apartment for convenience.

Of course the mild repulsion spell MoonFeather placed on the armory door beneath the stairs would make even the most insensitive feel prickly and uneasy.

The padlock on the door is firmly in place. As it should be. But what’s a mere padlock to an imp?

I slide underneath the door into the closet that has been a priest hole, a station on the Underground Railroad, and housed Tess’ collection of mundane and not so ordinary blades.

She took all the good stuff with her. Most of it’s in mini storage now. But she left a few cheap replica weapons just to make it look like she doesn’t have an armory elsewhere.

I stashed the crystal ball here because of the magical shielding MoonFeather added.

And there it is, sharing a shelf with a stiletto. It glows and pulses, more powerful now than before. It pulls energy into itself.

I am afraid of what I will see if I look too deeply into the swirling milky depths of the sphere.

But look I must.

First I light a cigar, one of my favorite black cherry cheroots. Three quick puffs and I feel fortified to face anything.

I expect to find spirals of malicious black sparked with red embers, something stark and barren and evil.

Much to my surprise, I find green and blue with pink and white sparkles. The entire globe is filled with The Essence of Faery. Not just the little patch Tess and I explored.

Faery lost more energy than we could account for while a smarmy producer kept twenty real faeries imprisoned in his casino in Las Vegas. Tess and I rescued the faery dancers. We thought we closed the portal that brought them to this world. Apparently, we didn’t seal it tight enough. Faery is still leaking.

All that energy in the new dimension is waiting for a hand or mind to turn it to good or evil, a haven for refugees, or a hiding place for outlaws and renegades.

And the crystal ball is the only portal.

UM, TESS, ARE YOU AWAKE?
Scrap asked.

I looked up from scrubbing my face. Scrap showed up as a dim outline of wavy lines reflected in the bathroom mirror.

Six very long weeks of sleeping on sofas and cots, I hadn’t fully adjusted to having my own room and private bath back.

No word from Lady Lucia since the furniture delivery this morning. Her guilt gift. But Scrap informed me she had hired a new nanny and was running her empire from a second suite in her hotel.

I’d made a little progress assessing what the girls could and could not do academically. A mixed bag of skills. Math went no further than the girls painfully copying the numerals in order. They read the classics beautifully but could not write, not even their own names.

“You know I’m awake, Scrap. What’s wrong that you felt you had to ask?”

“I asked you to do that days ago. But we’ve been a little busy since then. What did you do with it?”

“Will I need it?”

“Why will I need it?”

“Huh?”

Then he told me about the power leakage from every corner of the Universe. He held something back. He always did.

“Scrap, I’m not likely to need to get out of my bargain with the Powers That Be.”

“We haven’t gotten that far.” I wasn’t going to jump into a serious relationship after the last three disasters. “How come you aren’t pushing me to renew my relationship with Gollum?” My heart sank. If Scrap gave up on us, then there really was no hope.

“Yes, I know that.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I know. If he only needed to protect her, he’d have set up a trust fund and divorced her. She probably wouldn’t know the difference while she was in the asylum.”

“It’s probably going to take both of those and then some to separate him from her. If she is Squishy’s new lover, I’m not sure even that will separate them. So, do you think Sean and I might make a go of it?”

“Good advice. If he can’t survive two days at the local con, he’ll miss out on a big part of my life. He won’t know what makes me tick, why I need the stimulation and support of that community. He’ll already miss big chunks of my life because of his job commitment.”

“Is he really reading and enjoying them, or just skimming to please me?”

Scrap gave an impish shrug.

“He calls me and talks about the books as if he has a passing acquaintance. And he is cute. And sexy. And intelligent. But he keeps worse hours at work than I do. It’s a little difficult to base a relationship on telephone calls.”

“I don’t know yet. Do we have to do anything?”

“But will they ever make that decision, or just let it ride, holding it as a carrot in front of the applicants to force them into obeying their rules?”

“Phonetia suggested the forest elf might need the crystal ball to heal the wound I gave him.”