would have been short enough, Martha insisted they keep her van. “It’s dark out, and I hardly need the old beast,” she said. “I only held on to it for sentimental reasons. I want you to have it. Take it, I insist.”
Michael wondered what could make one person feel so much generosity toward another, but when Bryony stood at her own threshold and said, “Welcome home!” to him with that bright smile of hers, he understood completely. He wanted to give the world to her. An old van would not have given him a moment’s hesitation.
Her home was a Victorian farmhouse with a heavy front door, a weathered veranda, and peeling blue paint. Michael ducked inside as Bryony proudly went around illuminating every lamp. At the foot of the main staircase, a wooden orb crowned the newel post. Over the years, her family must have polished it smooth with every touch. He noticed a path up the stairs where years of climbing had disproportionately worn away the finish. Every surface spoke of the house’s history—the wainscoting, the textured green wallpaper, the fireplace. Oh, the fireplace was magnificent with its dark wood and decorative tiles. He ran his hands over the mantle, letting his fingers trace the scrolls and vines carved into it.
Bryony returned, having given light and life to the entire first floor. “Do you like it?”
“It’s wonderful. How long has this been in your family?”
“Oh, years and years.” She waved a dismissive hand. “I honestly don’t know. My father’s family tended to put down roots. My mother’s never did. Staying here was her big sacrifice for him, I guess. She really did love him.” She laughed. “I’m just glad it has high ceilings. The old houses usually do, you know.”
“I know.” He grinned at her. “It couldn’t be more perfect. Show me the rest.”
She bounced on the balls of her feet and showed him the kitchen and formal dining room. There was an upright piano in the parlor with yellowing keys and cobwebs draped like doilies over the top. “Do you play?” he asked.
“No, my father played. Music was never my strong suit. Come to think of it, I don’t really have a strong suit, do I?”
She really was extraordinarily hard on herself. Michael wanted to deal a blow to the incessant little voice that seemed to constantly whisper to her that she was not good enough. He lifted her by the waist, ignoring her playful shouts of protest, and placed her on the staircase where she was almost equal to his height. Then he stood on the other side of the banister.
“Listen, Bryony. I’ve been a godhunter more than half the years I’ve been alive. I don’t show mercy. I don’t hesitate. No god has ever survived me.” His expression grew severe at the memories. “That is, until you. You changed everything. I’m rethinking my entire life, and I wouldn’t bet against Raeni and the Black Armada rethinking the way they do things too. If you’d been a master pianist, it would have changed nothing for us.” He nuzzled her. He couldn’t help it. It was so good to have her stand at his level, to just lean in and hold her. “I never needed a pianist anyway.” He brushed his lips against the soft skin under her jaw. “What I needed was a home.”
“I’m glad you like the house.”
“I wasn’t talking about the house.”
She smiled and wrapped her arms around his neck. “It’s all yours.” Then she urged him around the banister and up the stairs. “Come and see the rest.”
There was a small library at the top of the stairs with two comfortable chairs and a little table between them. All around the library were closed doors, and Bryony opened them one at a time. Michael glanced into each room as she revealed it. The process reminded him of a winter from his youth when he’d found a beach house with an Advent calendar still affixed to the refrigerator. He’d popped open each little door dutifully on the appropriate day and not given in to the temptation to open them all at once. The chocolate was old and had a bad texture, but he’d eaten it anyway. It was more about the ritual than anything, and Bryony revealing her home in little bursts of enthusiasm felt just the same.
“This is the master bedroom. And here’s where my brother and I slept when we were little. This is the bathroom. There’s a handheld shower, so I think it’ll work for you. Maybe we can raise the curtain up a bit. Oh, and this was my mother’s workroom.”
So many years of wandering from empty house to empty house made Michael doubt the very concept of home. He could never wholly believe in good things that lasted. Even now, part of him questioned his own fortune as he ducked into the workroom and saw stacks of fabrics, a long cheval mirror, scissors, measuring tape, and a sewing machine.
He wanted to cry. He didn’t, but he wanted to. A sewing machine! He drifted toward it. Was his mouth hanging open? Did he really care? His hands seemed to touch it of their own accord. “Does it still work?”
“Of course it does,” Bryony said, beaming up at him. “And it’s yours. The whole room is yours now.”
Michael had used a sewing machine exactly once in his life. He never imagined he would one day own one. “This is amazing.” He turned to face her. “This is . . .” He couldn’t find the words, so he just repeated, “Amazing. I love you.” Sometimes it was the only thing he could think to say to her. His chest expanded with nothing else. Just, I love you.
She laughed. “Do you want to see the attic? It’s where my mother kept all her extra fabric. I bet you could find enough to make a change of clothes or two.”
He stumbled after her, not wanting to take his eyes off the sewing machine. He touched the casing overhead as he ducked back through the door, imagining the hours he would spend in that room, not quite ready to leave it.
At the end of the hall, he waited as Bryony climbed the staircase to the attic. He needed to gather his thoughts and breathe. His heart was treading too close to worship. It built in him like a pressure. He leaned against a round window frame and pressed his forehead to the stained glass. Through a haze of purple, he could see a little grove of trees trembling in the wind. He focused on the branches, on the sensation of glass cooling his skin, on the woodgrain of the windowsill plucking at his fingertips like the drum of a music box. Somewhere downstairs, a clock was ticking.
Then he heard a gasp followed by, “What the hell?” And he immediately made his way up the stairs after her.
The half-sized, dusty room was stifling, but Michael walked on his knees to Bryony, who stood aghast in the middle of the attic. She had pulled the cord to illuminate a bare lightbulb overhead and now stared down at a litter of papers arranged into small piles like dried leaves in autumn. Most of the papers were yellowed with age, apparently taken from the envelopes that lay alongside them. It wasn’t chaos. It was organized. Someone had done this.
“What the hell?” she repeated, blinking at the scene.
“You didn’t do this?” Michael already knew the answer, but he still felt obliged to ask.
“Of course not! These are my family’s letters. I would never disrespect them like this.” She bent down and picked up one handwritten note that lay at her feet. “This one was from my father to my mother. He wrote her love letters when she traveled for performances. I haven’t looked at them since he died. Who did this?”
Michael frowned. “Maybe someone broke in?” But no ordinary burglar would take the time to sit and read a person’s letters, would they?
“All the doors were locked when we got here,” Bryony said. “Every window was closed. The key was hidden where I’ve always kept it. I don’t understand how they got in, unless . . .” Her face scrunched up in thought and suddenly smoothed again in bitter understanding. “Loki.” She fumed. “He knew where the key was, and even if he didn’t, he could have turned himself into a colony of ants and marched under the door. It was him. I know it. How dare he! He knows how important these are to me.”
Michael tried to ignore his aching knees. “But why would he bother?”
She threw her hands up. Her good mood seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. “How can I ever know why he does what he does? He’s practically a stranger to me.” Michael put an arm around her shoulders, and she turned into him to accept the embrace. “I have to clean this up.”
“Later,” he said. Her body felt so small all of a sudden. How could he have even thought to worship her moments ago? Worship was a kind of dependence, and she needed him to be there for her, not the other way around. “We’ll clean it up together. In the meantime, let’s get some rest. If you’re even half as tired as I am . . .”
She straightened in his arms. “Oh, of course!” She pulled away and hurried down the stairs. It took Michael a bit more time to crawl after her. As he descended, he heard a loud thud and a scraping sound. When he finally got to the bottom of the staircase, he saw Bryony trying to push a twin bed out of the smaller bedroom. She had turned it on its side, and the feet were caught on the doorframe. He could see it shift this way and that as she tested its position from the other side.
“Let me help with that.” He took hold of the bedframe and quickly maneuvered it through the door. Together they moved the whole assembly to the master bedroom. Michael asked where she wanted it, assuming she meant for them to sleep separately. The look on her face told him he’d made a grievous error.
She shifted her end toward a large four-poster bed. “Here,” she said. She turned the twin bed sideways and slid it up against the foot of the other. Michael didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She disappeared and returned carrying a rope with which she proceeded to secure the two beds. His hands tensed and relaxed in turn.
Before she had quite finished, he pleaded, “Please stop. Oh, please come here.” And he greedily took her into his arms, pulling her down onto the bed with him. The stretch he allowed himself when he finally lay down was heaven after days in taxis, trains, and vans. “How will I ever make it up to you?”
Bryony lay on her side next to him, her head propped on one elbow. “Must you always make such a big deal of little favors?”
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in until she was comfortably tucked against his chest. “They aren’t little favors,” he murmured. “They’re enormous, important favors. You’ll save the world with them one day.”
Bryony woke the next morning, still in the clothes she’d worn the night before. Michael slept beside her with one arm shoved under his pillow, his hair as black as soot against the white pillowcase. Neither of them had found the energy to ready themselves for bed last night.
She dressed quietly, choosing a familiar Regency gown from her mother’s old costumes. It felt so good, slipping that black dress over her head. She zipped up the side and pulled a pair of lace gloves from a dresser drawer. She’d just given up trying to wrangle her hair into a braid when something struck the window. Bryony jumped at the sound. Then it struck again. And again. It was a familiar tap, tap, tap—more forceful than a twig in the wind, lighter perhaps than a pebble thrown from the ground.
Bryony pushed back the curtain to find a little, black crow standing on the windowsill. Loki. She pressed her finger to her lips in an effort to quiet him, and the bird cocked his head. Then he drew back to peck again. “Dammit, bird,” she hissed and opened the window before he could wake Michael.
The crow hopped in and waddled across the floor to the bedroom door. Bryony opened that for him too. As soon as he was in the hall, he shifted into a full-sized, completely naked man. “Hello, Bryony,” he said, clearly proud of the shocked expression she wore.
She groaned. “Can’t you ever turn human with clothes on?”
He looked down at himself and clapped his hands to his cheeks. “Oh, dear! How mortifying. Please accept my deepest apologies and condolences for your maidenly innocence.”
“Oh, for god’s sake.” Bryony fished around her linen closet for a towel, which she tossed to him. “Go and get your pants. I’m certain you left them in the yard.”
“That I did. Martha didn’t want to wake you, so I told her I’d check to see if you were sleeping.”
“And you did this by banging on my window? You’re lucky Michael’s a heavy sleeper.” She followed the shapeshifter downstairs. The ease with which he moved through her house unnerved her, but she reminded herself it had been his home too. Shakespeare would feel comfortable enough to push his way in and stomp around like he owned the place. Seeing him as a man was something Bryony was going to have to get used to.
Loki made his way to the kitchen and opened the back door for Martha, who walked in overloaded with grocery bags. “Grab the rest, will you? It’s on the porch.” His state of undress didn’t seem to throw Martha at all. She was an engine that ran without the slightest hiccup, and Loki obeyed her like a well-behaved retriever. It was frankly astounding.
Martha set her bags on the counter and paused to give Bryony a quick hug. “I thought you might need something in your pantry,” she said. “How’s your . . . friend?”
“It’s okay to call him my boyfriend.” Warmth bloomed in Bryony’s cheeks when she thought of Michael still asleep in her bed. “It’s more than okay, actually.”
“No kidding?” Martha laughed and began to stock the pantry with baking goods and dry cereal. “If you don’t mind my asking, how far along in the relationship are you? Will we be hearing wedding bells any time soon?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.” Loki stood in the doorway, now fully clothed and carrying three more grocery bags. “They hardly know each other. They met less than two months ago.”
“I’m fairly confident I know him better than I know you,” Bryony argued. “And I lived with you for ten years.”
Loki had bitten off the corner of a block of cheese before putting it in the fridge and now spoke with his mouth full. “That’s only because I was lying to you the whole time.”
It took Bryony a moment to get past the bluntness of what he’d just admitted. How was one supposed to argue with the truth? “Right. Speaking of that, you’re no longer welcome to enter my house uninvited. Do you understand? I can’t believe you came back here after everything and just . . . helped yourself to the place while I was gone.”
“And what makes you think I set one foot inside this house?” He pulled an egg out of the fridge, cracked it on the counter, and promptly swallowed the innards. “These are still good.”
Bryony nearly gagged. Somehow, the things he did as a bird were disgusting to her now that he was a man. “I found the letters. Did you think I wouldn’t?”
He blinked. “What letters?”
She was about to argue with him and insist he knew exactly what she was talking about, but his perplexed expression gave her pause. “The . . . The letters in the attic. My family’s papers. Everything’s been gone through, scattered.”
“I see.” Loki sniffed another package and made a face at it. “And you think I wouldn’t have the foresight to put things back after I rifled through them?”
“I . . .” Bryony thought a moment. It did seem entirely unlike him.
Martha leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Do you mean to say you had a break-in while you were away? Did they steal anything?”
“No,” Bryony answered. “They didn’t really break in either. All the doors were still locked, and the key was where I always keep it. Shakespeare was the only one who could get into my house without breaking in. That’s why I thought—”
“Believe me,” Loki interjected. “I have absolutely zero interest in your family’s paperwork. I have zero interest in paperwork in general. I’ve gotten everything I ever needed to know about you just by asking. In bird form, obviously. You’re inordinately keen to talk to animals.” He smiled in a way Bryony supposed was meant to be charming, but it produced the opposite effect in her. “Do you prefer the crow? I can change back if you like. It’s not a bad shape to be in. Food tastes remarkably better, for one.”
“Don’t you dare,” Bryony snarled at him. “Especially if it means you’ll turn up completely naked in my hallway again.”
Loki rolled his eyes. “As if you never stripped in front of me.”
“I thought you were a bird at the time! And speaking of that—”
“It’s not like I got any pleasure—”
“I’m sorry, what? Oh, you’d better think of a compliment now.”
“Your breasts are flawless. There. Will that do? Now your turn.”
“Children!” Martha shouted to quiet them, and just for a moment, Bryony saw a sliver of Raeni in her. “We have another participant in the conversation. You may want to keep him in mind before taking this any further.”
Michael had ducked in so quietly only Martha had noticed him. Now he stood in the kitchen, half frozen between rubbing his eyes and yawning. His cheeks were turning a shade Bryony recognized as embarrassment mixed with anger. She let her dispute die in favor of throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his wrinkled shirt.
“You’re up,” she said gently. “I’m sorry if we woke you.”
“It’s all right.” His eyes scanned the kitchen, the guests, the food. “Did you go shopping already?”
“Martha did.” Bryony pulled away, but Michael kept hold of her hand.
“I didn’t help at all,” Loki said, his sarcasm evident. “And my thorough knowledge of what you typically keep in your pantry was of no use whatsoever.”
Apparently, Bryony wasn’t tired of arguing with him. “Knowledge ill-gotten, you ass,” she snapped before she could stop herself. “And half of what I kept on hand was for you anyway.”
“I know.” Loki popped an unwashed grape into his mouth. “It still is. I’m so magnanimous, though, that I’m even willing to share with a snake.”
Michael had disengaged from the conversation and was examining Bryony’s lace gloves as though he’d never seen anything like them. He bowed over her and murmured, “You look stunning in this. Was it one of your mother’s?”
She would never understand his ability to tune out the universe and focus only on the things that made him happy. That quality made him more beautiful than his high cheekbones, broad mouth, and dark eyes ever could. “It was,” Bryony finally answered.
“It’s good quality.” He crouched beside her to examine the seams of her dress. “Did she make this herself?”
“Yes. For a production of Mansfield Park.” Bryony would have loved to introduce Michael to her mother. She imagined the two of them discussing craftsmanship and technique.
“Did she play Fanny Price?”
He knew the story? But of course he did. Bryony laughed at her failure to predict him when he made it so incredibly easy. “She was Mary Crawford.”
“I wish I could have seen her performance.”
“Me too.” She took his hand and kissed it. “She would have loved you.”