Helena
When a van pulled up to the house four weeks later, I was standing on the expansive porch of Greenwood Manor.
A van? It was hard to imagine faeries riding in a van. That must be quite a journey.
The driver’s door opened and my brother jumped down, dusted off his hands—leave it to Harris to act like the steering wheel he had been holding was unclean because god forbid he had to touch his own sweat—and looked at me with a smile that did seem like it had grown warmer in recent years.
“I didn’t know you were coming with them!” I exclaimed.
“Someone had to drive,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise you.” He shook my hand.
Jake and Jasper were giving us weird looks as they were walking out behind me. Harris noticed them and then looked at me.
“Did you tell them something unfavorable about me?” he asked in an undertone.
“No. They think it’s weird that we don’t hug, I think.”
“Should we?”
“I guess we could.”
“Good lord,” Jake said, watching us try to tentatively back pat at the same time.
“We just don’t hug much!” I said. “I’m sorry!”
“Well, I know you know how to hug,” Jasper said, putting an arm around me. He offered Harris a hand. “So you’re the famous brother, huh?”
“I am.” Harris shook back and Jasper pulled us both into a hug and gave Harris a robust back slap.
“Like that,” he said.
“I guess you’re Jake.”
Jasper snarled. “No! I’m Jasper! I guess Hel told you that Jake is the fun one.”
“I actually said Jake is the obnoxious one, but you’re right. You really do trade off.”
Graham had bypassed us to greet the faeries. Five of them were emerging from the van like pilgrims stepping nervously off the Mayflower. Four were men, one was a woman. For a moment I thought they were all together, but Harris said,
“The faery queen sent five heads of household who have earned her favor but don’t have their own domains,” Harris said. “If any one of them is interested, we’ll discuss further and they’ll want to find a human wife or husband. They’re all, uh, pretty high born…”
I might not have had twin radar with Harris, but we certainly were close enough that I could read between the lines. The faery queen wanted to send this group because she considered this a privilege, but they were not even remotely prepared to live in Louisiana. Not a single one of them.
“Oh…well…great!” If this didn’t go well, I was going to take to bed myself. Out of embarrassment. This was all my grand plan. “Well, this is Greenwood Manor. It was constructed about one hundred and seventy years ago—”
“So, a young house,” one of the men said. He had red hair and was wearing a blue tunic, and like all of them, would definitely need a major lesson in cultural assimilation.
“Yes, yes. A nice, new, young house.”
“This region looks fertile, but the house does occasionally suffer from floods, does it not?” another one of them said. We’ll call him “Silver Staff” because that’s what he was carrying.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I did look at the flood maps but it seemed to be only in the hundred year flood plain, so not often. The property fronts water but it is pretty far from the house.”
“It will flood more,” Silver Staff declared. “The earth is sick.”
“I worry not about such matters,” the woman said. She had a very thick accent that sounded vaguely Irish. “I am skilled at water craft.”
Graham was looking at them and me like, What the hell is this?
“Well, let me tell you, if you’re skilled at water craft, you’re going to love Louisiana,” I said. “The entire state has a lot of water for magical usage as well as recreation. It’s a hot spot for magic in the Fixed Plane in general, and this house is wonderfully situated with a lot of different terrain on the acreage. So let me give you a tour…”
Gaston and Billie were sitting on the new porch furniture. Billie was saying, “And that was when Mama yelled, ‘I told you not to put that armadillo on that trampoline!’”
Someday I would have to find out how these stories began.
Gaston chuckled in an indifferent way and said, “Bonjour, future neighbors, eh?”
“Oh…neighbors?” Silver Staff said.
“I live down the river a bit, in the cabin, with the horses,” Gaston said.
“Way down there,” Graham said, waving into the distance, because the faeries clearly didn’t see Gaston as a positive.
I brought up the rear and stopped to slap the table where Gaston had his ash tray and empty glass of lunch blood. “I thought we agreed last night that you’re okay with selling this house and you’re not going to cause any trouble?”
“How did I cause any trouble? I’m being very charming. Who doesn’t want me as a neighbor? They’ll feel as if they live in Burgundy.”
“Oh, please,” I growled.
“Of course I want someone to buy it. I worked hard on it. We both did.”
“Well, I want to see what they think of my cottage and my kitchen,” Billie said, jumping up.
I started to feel a little better as the faeries admired the front rooms of the house. They liked the colors of the walls, the fireplaces, the solid wood furniture, old handworked lacy things and flower arrangements Billie used to furnish the house with a simple, old world charm. They even liked the naked lady stair ornament, giving it approving nods.
But then we came to the yellow kitchen. It was a pretty, sunshine-y room, but Billie had been unable to resist throwing the country touches around, the chicken plates, ruffled lace curtains, and some Depression-era storage containers and spice jars. I didn’t think it meshed well, but I let her do it. She’d already been through a lot.
For once, I was unhappy to be right.
“Oh, dear gods, this is the kitchen?” the faery woman said. “It’s very bright. I don’t like these curtains at all. And this is a human oven?”
“Although bright, I think it must be cold in winter without a fireplace or bread oven,” said the fairy man whose hair was almost a bluish-gray color.
“It’s really pretty warm here all year,” I said.
“Isn’t it nice to have a brightly colored kitchen?” Billie said, tugging on her hair nervously. “I’d probably eat my breakfast right here at this island.”
“Eat breakfast here with the servants and the kitchen odors?” said Silver Staff.
“You won’t need servants,” Jake said. “How much time does it take just to maintain an old stove? Here, you can just do this.” He turned on a burner.
“Our human wife will do this, I suppose,” said Blue-Gray.
“Harris…jeez, I think this would be going a lot better if we didn’t have the most Fancypants faeries,” I whispered as Jake and Jasper started taking them upstairs. “I know there are basic faeries who would love living here.”
“There isn’t that much I can do about it!” Harris said. “You know how these things are! Queen Morgana probably has reasons to reward this crew with the guardianship of a parallel.”
“Then why are they acting like they don’t want to live here?”
He paused. “Well, maybe she’s actually punishing some people she doesn’t want in court by giving them the guardianship of a parallel…I mean, that’s definitely what I would do. They can’t say no to the ‘honor’ but she never has to hang out with them ever again.”
“Ohhh.” I nodded. That made a lot of sense. “Great…”
“There are surely some low fey who would love to live here,” Harris added. “But they won’t have the gold to buy it. But you just want the money, right?”
“I guess.” I sighed. “It’s all about the money. I know.”
“I’m sure one of them will want it just to be the guardian of a parallel,” he said.
Well, he was wrong. The faeries would have liked the house better if we never touched it, I think. The more we had changed a room, the less they liked it. That bedroom I stripped of all the gaudy fabric wallpaper and bed coverings? The lady faery immediately declared that room “too plain” but said she could just put up painted paneling or tapestries and bring in her bed with the ostrich feathers.
But they hated that bathroom especially. So dark! So plain! “So…utilitarian,” sniffed Red Hair.
When they walked the grounds, they spotted the original toilet now being used as a planter and went nuts when they learned that we had taken it from the bathroom.
Fuck me.
They actually liked the artist’s cottage, though. Oh, of course.
“Well, that was shit,” Graham said, as soon as Harris left with them all, grimacing at me as he told me he’d call me back with an update.
“Yeah…”
“I can’t believe they just complained about all this hard work.”
“It’s actually pretty typical,” Jasper said. “Potential buyers always complain. It’s when you get one with a glow in their eyes that you know you’ve found the right owner.”
“It’s true,” I said. “Even the guy who bought the last house had that glow in his eyes, even if his wife didn’t.”
“They might buy it anyway, but they won’t be happy here,” Jake said. “I hate to say it, but I think you should get a Realtor on it.”
“Nooo!” Billie and I both slumped across the table at once. “That will take more time,” I said.
“And we won’t get as good of a price!” Billie said.
“How can we buy the next house if we can’t get gold for this one?” I asked.
It was just as we feared. Harris called me and said the faeries didn’t want the house at this time. Despite the strategic importance for the realm of Wyrd to secure pieces of the human world, the faeries had been isolated from humans for so many centuries that they were just plain refusing to act upon the strategy.
“Queen Morgana said that she does have some low fae who are interested, but she is working out the finances. The house would have to be purchased by the kingdom’s treasury and owned by the crown, but occupied by the low fae, and that is causing its own set of problems. She said that if you had a human bride, that would help immensely.”
“I don’t have a ‘human bride’, Harris, you know I have no friends! I certainly don’t just keep brides on a shelf! Billie, you said you had a friend, didn’t you?”
“I’m not going to approach any of my friends with this situation anymore,” Billie said sourly. “First thing Kate’s going to want to know is how I got turned into a vampire during a house flip.”
So that was that. We had one of those houses—a beautiful home that was just too personal to sell to anyone, both for its size and the fact that not just anyone could live in a magical parallel. Dead weight. We couldn’t move on.
Not very long after I got off the phone with Harris, while I was still sitting in the phone nook brooding over the situation, it rang again, and the person on the other end of the line was asking for Graham.
“Graham? Phone for you…”
“How odd,” he said warily, taking the old telephone out of my hand. “Hello? Speaking, yes. Yes… Really? No heirs? Yes…I am very surprised.”
Byron came up behind me, looking pleased, as Graham hung up the phone. “I told you to trust me,” Byron said.
“That was the executor of Sam’s will,” Graham said. “Sam didn’t have any kids, so…he left Bel Tramonto to me.”
“Byron, did you kill the old man and make him change his will!?”
Byron held up his hands. “No! This was done years before! When Sam was more with it, he definitely had wished for Pandora’s Box to be opened, and he was sorry he killed me. You’ll see. You’ll find what you’re looking for.”
Will I find…you?
That scared me a little. Byron’s body must be there. He was obviously leading us to this spot.
“That makes it easy!” Billie clapped her hands when we told them all the news.
“So we get to go to California but we don’t even have to fight it out with Caleb and Kiersten,” Jake said. “This is a dream job.”
“I wonder if the house will even need much work,” Jasper said. “Being in California, it must be newer. It will definitely have a kitchen, even if stuff needs updating. And it sounds like this guy had new money, not old depleted money…”
“That is true. But you might…want to tweak a few things,” Byron said. “Although you don’t have to sell it at all. It’s Graham’s house.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Graham said, and we busted open more wine and some takeout menus to celebrate.
“So…are you gunning for revenge on those witches too, Gaston, or would you rather stay here?” Billie asked, and I saw that she was nervous, but it had to be asked. Those two had a little thing going, but it was too short-term to be this serious. On the other hand, as a new vampire, she really ought to be sticking with him until she got past the difficult phase, so I wasn’t sure we should take her along if he didn’t go.
“I guess I’d better,” he said. “And I haven’t forgotten what I said at first. I’m still not sure about Byron, demigod or not. I’ll go to keep an eye on you.”
That’s an excuse to pretend he doesn’t care if I ever heard one, I thought, smiling. Once we worked out our theory of Byron from the Arcana, Gaston hadn’t said another word about him. He likes Billie, and I like…
All four of my men were gathered around, and we’d been living on top of each other, but as usual, the relationship had taken a back seat to other stuff. It was easy to juggle this new arrangement when we didn’t really have to confront what it meant. If we survived Pandora’s Box, it would be time for me to figure out what my future really was. Jake and Jasper already had a future in mind…work together, meet the family, have a kid or two I guess. Graham and Byron were the opposite…one of them dead to his old world, and the other just plain dead.
I needed to bring them together down one path, or I would have to make a choice.
At least everything else was coming together. At least, so I thought that night, as we shared takeout Italian and a little too much to drink, eating at the kitchen island, bringing some life to the cheerful yellow kitchen before we locked the doors on Greenwood Manor.
Thank you for reading! I always write a little note as I am uploading a new book, but in this case, as I was finishing the book my mom called and asked if I wanted to go with her to the discount grocery store across town! Get up at 7 am she said! Mom, I’m on a deadline! But I do need a bunch of random chocolate and mildly expired organic soup, so I guess I’ll keep this note short.
Thank you for your support for this series! I’m having so much fun with Helena and her friends. A number of you have told me how much you enjoy a heroine who does stuff and works hard…I’ve enjoyed that too and I wish I was as competent as Hel… Book three, Phantom of the Library, will be out in July. Please join my Facebook group and come hang out, follow my Instagram, and sign up for my mailing list to get a free copy of the Witch Among Warlocks prequel novella, The Wild-Eyed Boys! I have a number of series set in this same world and I’m going to leave with you a preview of one of my personal favorites, Fae Sworn, which gives you a peek into the faery court through the eyes of my most outrageous heroine, Daisy Pendleton.