Reg looked at Harrison. “Thank you for coming.”
“I didn’t have anything better to do.”
“Well… good. I don’t mean to call on you whenever something bad happens, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You were upset after we talked.”
“Yeah, I was.”
“That’s why you went with the spirit-eater?” He shook his head slowly. “I will never understand human emotions.”
“I’m not sure I can explain it myself. I wanted to… prove that I could take care of myself and that I could make my own decisions. It wasn’t all just… fate and immortals.”
“You made your own choice.”
“I knew it wasn’t a smart one at the time. But I didn’t care.”
“Are all humans as confusing as you?”
“Maybe not. I’m kind of… nonconforming.”
He nodded. He made a sort of a purring sound and Starlight came running from behind the counter and jumped into his lap. Harrison petted him.
“You need to learn to protect yourself against the warlock if you are going to allow him in your home.”
“I didn’t invite him in. I don’t know how he was able to get past the wards. He hasn’t been able to before. Do you think he’s that much stronger now?”
Harrison raised an eyebrow. “He is much stronger. But he does not yet have control of his powers. Much like you.”
Reg shook off the criticism. “Then how did he get past all of the wards?”
He looked slowly around the room. “He did not break them. Therefore, you let him in.”
“Those can’t be the only two ways for him to get in, because I didn’t let him in. I didn’t invite him. I didn’t allow him. He just… followed me in.”
“Maybe you do not remember properly,” Harrison suggested kindly.
“It just happened five minutes ago! I haven’t forgotten!”
“Humans have very faulty memories. Maybe you were drinking tonight? Or something else happened that might have altered your memories?”
“No! I had a couple of drinks, but not enough to cause any problems with my memory! I know exactly what happened.”
He scratched Starlight’s ears and bent down to whisper something to the cat. He looked back at Reg. “Tell me what happened, then.”
Reg started her narration with when they were still in the car when she had explicitly told Corvin that he would not be coming into the house. Harrison did not seem to find this significant. Reg went on and described his helping her to unlock the door when she had been so shaky.
Harrison nodded. “You see?”
“What?”
“You gave him your key, and he unlocked and opened the door.”
“Well… not exactly, but…”
“When you give someone a key, you are giving them permission to enter.”
“But… I told him he couldn’t come in. I told him I didn’t want him in. Doesn’t that mean that I didn’t invite him in? Yes, he helped me to find my keys and get the door open, but that doesn’t mean that I gave him permission to come into my house.”
Harrison steepled his hands together, looking at her. Obviously, that was precisely what it did mean.
“No,” Reg protested.
“I am not in charge of human magic,” Harrison said. “I did not set the wards or set the conditions of their operation. Your witch friend did that. The wards will only function against those who you do not permit to enter. You permitted the warlock to enter by giving him your keys.”
“He took them out of my bag. I didn’t exactly give them to him.”
“He opened the door with your key. That makes him an invited guest.”
“And what if… someone stole my purse and used my key to let themselves into the house. The wards would not work?”
“No. They would not.”
Reg stared at him in disbelief.
“A key has potent magic,” Harrison explained. “You must always guard your keys well. Anyone who can use it has your authority.”
“But… what kind of magic is that? That’s stupid!”
“It is ancient magic. For as long as there have been powers, there have been keys.”
Reg’s head hurt. Maybe she’d had more to drink than she thought. Or maybe it was just everything that had happened. She was tired and confused. Holding off Corvin during the evening and the final struggle against him had been exhausting.
“Fine. Then I guess I invited him in. The invitation doesn’t stand, though, does it? Now that he’s gone, and he doesn’t have my keys, he can’t get back in?”
“Correct.”
“Okay. Why does it all have to be so complicated? And why can’t anyone tell me the rules to start with, instead of everything being a secret and having to figure it all out on my own through trial and error?”
“It is not complicated. It is very simple. You lack knowledge.”
Reg growled at that. “I’m going to bed. You do not need to come and tuck me in. And Starlight has been fed, no matter what he might tell you.”
Harrison looked at Starlight’s face, and Reg knew that he was going to feed Starlight despite her words. Reg put her hand on the counter to steady herself. She looked at the doorway to her bedroom, then back at Harrison.
“Do you have anything else to tell me? If you do, you’d better do it now.”
“Have a good sleep, Regina.”
She rubbed her eyes. “In the morning, will you show me how to do a proper protection spell against Corvin?”
“If I am here.”
“Will you be?”
“We will know when it is tomorrow.”
Reg tossed and turned restlessly. At first, she thought it was because Harrison was there, but later Starlight came in to watch out the window and afterward snuggled with her, so she knew that Harrison must be gone. He definitely preferred Harrison when he was there. Unless Harrison had sent Starlight to watch over Reg as she slept, he must have gone home—or wherever it was that immortals went. Mount Olympus? Hades? She wondered what kind of a place Harrison lived in.
When he disappeared, was he anywhere? Or everywhere? She suspected that he would tell her that she was again conflating the immortals with the Christian god. The immortals were not everywhere. But could they be? Were they somewhere, or were they nowhere or scattered across the universe?
She rolled over, scratched Starlight’s ears, and closed her eyes, trying to find that sweet spot so she could find sleep. She had gone to bed too early. She’d been keeping later nights recently, and getting up in the morning was becoming difficult.
“Just go to sleep,” she muttered to herself. “You’re tired. You want to have the strength to do things tomorrow, especially if Harrison will show you how to do a protection spell. You need to get some rest.”
It didn’t work. But then, it never did, so she wasn’t exactly expecting it to.
Eventually, her brain started to wander from one thing to another, and she knew she was close to sleep. It made illogical leaps and switched from one line of thought to another, and she strove just to let it wander so that eventually she could find the way to dreamland.
And then she was dreaming, and she wasn’t happy about it.
“Wake up!” a voice told her, and even though she tried to open her eyes and to look around, it was like her lids were stuck together with superglue. She ignored it and decided to stay asleep.
“Reg, it’s not safe. You need to listen to me. Regina!” The voice reached a screech, and Reg found herself pulling away in fear, knowing that physical punishment would follow continued disobedience. But how was she supposed to get the sleep she needed if she let the dream wake her up?
“Are you listening?” The voice was definitely Norma Jean’s. “The door. You need to make sure it is locked.”
“The door is locked,” Reg mumbled, her words thick.
She had locked it after Corvin had gone, hadn’t she? It wasn’t like he was going to be coming back there anyway. He would go away and sulk and try to come up with another tactic to get what he wanted.
She was safe.
Besides, Harrison was there. He wasn’t going to let anyone hurt her. He was her guardian.
“You cannot trust them,” Norma Jean’s screechy voice lowered to a whisper. “You can’t trust any of them. They don’t tell the truth.”
“Men?”
“Men, angels, immortals, they are all the same. You cannot know what is in their minds. Their lips are lies. All lies.”
“When you got pregnant, did you know that Weston was your baby’s father? Did you know that he was magical? An immortal?”
“Who knows what they really are? They come in cover of darkness, and they do not let you know who they are behind the mask. All men are like this.”
Reg groaned. “Oh, just let me go to sleep, mother. I’m not getting tangled up with any men, so you don’t need to worry about that.”
“Check the lock. Make sure the door is locked.”
Eventually, Norma Jean’s shrieks and threats woke Reg up completely. She lay there in bed, waiting for sleep to come back, but the dream kept returning to her and she knew she couldn’t get back to sleep until she got up and checked the door.
“The lock, the lock, the lock…” echoed in her head, repeated over and over again in a litany.
Starlight looked up and made a little noise as Reg got out of bed. Hardly able to keep her eyes open, Reg stumbled across the cottage to the front door. Harrison had, she noted, thought to turn off the lights before he had disappeared to wherever it was he went. She got to the door and checked the locks. Both the handle and the deadbolt were in the locked position.
Reg shook her head.
“Crazy ghost. You’d better let me go to sleep now.”
In the morning, she eventually wiped the vestiges of her restless dreams away and got out of bed. Starlight wasn’t in the room any longer, and she hoped that might mean that Harrison was on hand and she could get some lessons from him on protecting herself. She had not done too poorly in constructing protective spells since he had first protected her from the Witch Doctor, imitating his spell the best she could, but she didn’t know how to make it stronger and wasn’t sure she was going about it the right way at all.
When she walked out to the kitchen and looked around, it was apparent that he had not returned. Starlight was standing by the fridge and looked up at her imperiously.
“Well, good morning to you too, your highness. Thank you for letting me sleep in.”
He stretched his muscles without changing position, making a little shiver run through him from ears to tail. He waited, drilling into her with his eyes.
“If no one else can tell me who you are or where you came from, maybe you can. Are you Weston?”
He blinked. She didn’t get the feeling that he was. He was a cat, and it was silly of her to think that he could be an immortal, especially not the immortal who was her father or had created her.
“No? Were you owned by an immortal? How does Harrison know you?”
No response. Maybe Starlight didn’t want to communicate before breakfast. It wasn’t like she couldn’t figure out what he wanted as he sat by the fridge door waiting for her. Maybe after breakfast, he would find a way to communicate more to her about his past. She had been able to get information from him before, just little bits of ideas, like his name. He was the one who had chosen Starlight, not she. She would probably have ended up naming him something lame like “Tux” or “Whiskers.”
Reg added some dry kibble to his bowl, and while he had been eating the pricey brand that she had started to buy, he didn’t show any interest in it when she was there to get him something better out of the fridge.
“No spicy chicken today,” Reg told him. She opened the fridge, having to push him out of the way with her foot to avoid hitting him. It wasn’t like he didn’t know where he needed to sit for her to open the fridge unimpeded. He seemed to block it deliberately.
Reg looked inside. There was half a pizza, and she had no idea where it had come from. Harrison didn’t drink coffee; did he eat pizza? Did immortals need to eat food? Or could they eat it for enjoyment? She remembered something about a special drink on Mount Olympus. And they had definitely had parties with lots of wine and food. Maybe they could eat if they chose but didn’t need to. Maybe Harrison didn’t like coffee, but had the same need for physical nourishment as she did. She opened the lid of the pizza.
Meat lover’s. Definitely not the gnome, then.
Would immortals be vegetarian? She decided not. If they didn’t care what happened to humans and didn’t have any rules against hurting them, then she doubted they would have any regulations about hurting non-human animals either. Was it Artemis who was the goddess of the hunt and had led the gods to kill some special kind of deer? Reg shook her head. She pulled out a couple of pieces of pizza for her breakfast and looked in the various bowls in the fridge for something for Starlight’s. Spicy Italian sausage would not be a good choice for Starlight, and she had heard that they didn’t digest cow’s milk very well. That probably applied to cheese as well. She found some roast beef that Sarah had left on Sunday and turned around to put it on the cutting board.
She just about fainted with the shock of seeing Harrison on the other side of the island, helping himself to her pizza.
That answered the question of whether immortals could eat, then.
“Can’t you warn me before you appear like that?” she demanded.
“How could I tell you I am here before I am here?” Harrison took a big bite out of the slice of pizza. Reg put a couple more slices on a plate and then into the microwave. She cut up the roast beef for Starlight while she waited for the pizza to warm. When she took it out of the microwave, she could see Harrison’s nostrils quivering.
“Do you want yours warmed up too?”
He nodded and pushed his slices toward her. Reg obliged.
“Did you come back to help me with my protection spell?”
“Perhaps.”
“I really could use some instruction. I can do a little bit… but I don’t know if I’m doing it right.”
“If you are able to stop the spirit-eater, you are doing it right.”
“Well, that’s good. Then I just need to learn how to strengthen it. Or do it when I’m tired.”
She waited for the microwave, not wanting to start eating before Harrison had his pizza back. When it beeped, she pulled the plate out and handed it to him. “Now be careful. That will be hot. Don’t burn yourself.”
Harrison nodded at this wise advice and stood there, staring down at the food.
“We could sit down,” Reg offered awkwardly. She rarely sat down at the table to eat, usually standing at the island or sitting down in the living room. But she could act like a civilized person and eat at the table.
But they never got that far.