So much for pining for my beloved. I fell asleep almost immediately and woke at one, wide awake. I wasn't given to insomnia, so it took me a minute to realize why I’d awakened. I did a quick inventory. Was everyone okay?
I never thought that I was a light sleeper until the Brood came into my life. Now if Cherry Pip had a cough or Dalton moaned in his sleep, I heard it. This was different. All three of them were snoring on the floor around the bed. I sat up as silently as I could so as not to alert them I was awake. Being awake meant we started the morning routine, and it was way too early for that.
Had Mark made a sound and I’d heard it?
Last night I hadn’t finished reciting the hearing spell and something had awakened me. I heard a curious little pinging sound downstairs and knew what it was immediately — the new alarm at the front gate. A car had entered the grounds of Graystone and was slowing in front of the steps.
Nobody I knew would come to visit me without a phone call, family included.
“It’s a damn fortress. What the hell do they need with that many rooms?”
“Shut the hell up.”
Evidently, there was more than one person in the car. The question was, what were they doing here in the middle of the night?
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, waking Pepper who looked up at me with sleepy eyes.
"Sorry, sweetie," I said. “I need to check something out.”
I sleep in a nightshirt and I have a collection of them with clever sayings. The one I was wearing now had tiny little kittens all over it. My sister had given it to me for Christmas one year, before the Brood had come into my life and I always apologized to them when I wore it.
I threw on a robe, grabbed my slippers and tugged them on. I didn't turn on my light, because I didn't want them — whoever was parked in front of Graystone – to know that I was awake. Instead I walked through the sitting room, the three dogs following me in grand hopes of having an early breakfast, and crossed the hall.
The George Gervin room, like other guest suites, had an attached sitting room, bedroom, and bath. I wasn't as familiar with the layout of this room as I was my own, but being a Furry gave me some advantages in the dark. Things appeared on the gray side rather than black. Unfortunately, my enhanced vision didn't stop me from running into a small table. The lamp almost tumbled to the floor, but I caught it only to look up and see a shadow standing in the doorway.
I nearly lost it right then and there, but I bit back my startled yelp as the Brood ran up to Mark, greeting him like a long lost stranger instead of someone they'd seen only a few hours earlier.
“What's wrong, Torrance?”
One thing about Mark, he grasped a situation quickly.
I told him what I'd heard.
"There's not a turnaround once you enter the gate," I said. “A couple of people have gotten lost and realized it, but they've just taken the drive and gone right back out.”
“But you don’t think these people are lost.”
"Nope. Because right now they're sitting in front of the steps talking about how they’re going to do it.”
“Do what?”
“I can hear stuff,” I said, “but I can’t read minds. I don’t know.”
“I’ll get dressed,” he said, turning and going back into the bedroom. That's when I realized he was in pajama bottoms and nothing else.
For a moment, a fleeting moment, grant you, I gave some thought to following him and saying to hell with any danger lurking on the doorstep, almost literally.
My libido, who had been quiet for the past couple of weeks, roused and came out of the back of her cave, eyes fixed on the sight of Mark. I had a feeling she wasn’t going to let me forget what he looked like.
I rolled my eyes at myself.
He came out of the room dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. I couldn't help but wonder if he was wearing underwear. I know, what was wrong with me? My thoughts had never gone there before. It was all Mark’s fault.
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”
"Not on the hair of your chinny chin chin," I said. "You forget, I'm not the little woman who needs to be protected from the big, bad wolf. I am the big, bad wolf.”
He grinned at me and for a fleeting moment, I wanted to put my hands on either side of his face and pull him down for a kiss. I loved that grin. I wished I could turn on the light to see if there was a twinkle in his eyes.
Later, Torrance.
I wish I could say that we crept down the stairs silently. Not quite. We might have been able to do that if it was just Mark and me, but we were followed by three dogs. They were excited that we were heading in the general direction of the kitchen in the middle of the night, which could only mean one thing: food.
I swear I heard moans of disappointment when we turned toward the front door.
Pepper opened his mouth to bark, but Mark stopped and looked down at the Brood, giving them a silent command to be quiet. Those few seconds probably saved our lives.
I heard the sound first before I saw the explosion of flames through the fan light over the double doors. I jumped back, pulling Mark with me.
Pepper yelped and the other two dogs followed suit, their communal whining unusual and totally understandable. A few inches of metal and wood stood between us and a raging fire.
Most of Graystone was brick and stone, but there were other parts that were flammable. Lots of places like the formal parlors on the ground floor, my great-grandfather’s library, the Clan Hall filled with centuries of Boyd memories.
They couldn’t be destroyed.
Unfortunately, I hadn't thought to bring my phone, but Mark had. Even as he moved us all back into the main corridor of the house he was calling 911.
There were two other exits, the back porch that I always used and the side door that was rarely opened. I wasn't afraid that we were going to get trapped inside. In fact, fear wasn't even my main emotion at the moment. Rage was building in me.
Graystone was my heritage, a gift from my grandmother. My great-grandfather had designed and built it. It was where my father had grown up, where Sonia had held court, for lack of a better word.
It was my home.
How dare anybody try to destroy it.
I had never thought of fire as loud, but the sound of it was assaulting my ears. I didn't say the spell. I wanted to hear every single lick and shudder of it, every hungry click and moan. I didn't want to forget this moment, this night, or the sound of a man's voice, telling his partners in crime to shut the hell up.
I was going to find him.
Mark hung up the phone and tucked it into his back pocket.
“Shouldn’t we do something?”
"The fire department will be here in a few minutes. We should go out the back because of the smoke.”
"What if that's exactly what they want?" I asked.
I realized I was being a little paranoid, but I could probably be excused, given everything that had happened lately.
He didn’t answer me and I didn’t blame him. We really didn’t have any choice in the matter. The fire was spreading. I don’t know what they’d used as an accelerant, but it was clinging to the brick and racing up the windows. I heard the far off sirens and hoped to God they got here before the fire made it inside.
I heard a window shatter, the sound of it like a dagger to my spine.
Too late. The Silver Parlor was probably going up in flames.
"Come on, Torrance," he said, nearly pushing me down the corridor, toward the porch. The Brood was right with us, racing for safety.
“What happens to my grandmother, the ottoman, if Graystone burns down?”
Mark just stared at me as if I was losing my mind right in front of him. Normally, I'm very calm in a crisis, but I'd never had fire licking at the front of Graystone.
“We need an axe," I said. "Treaty or no treaty, if one of the vampires comes after me I swear I’m going to behead him.”
"Okay, Torrance," Mark said in a very calm, very reasonable voice. The kind of tone you used when someone was going nutso.
I put my hands over my ears to block out the sound of the sirens a little. I don't know how many fire engines were pulling in front of Graystone, but it sounded like every single one from our small incorporated city, plus a few from San Antonio.
Ten or twenty would be fine with me. As many as they needed to put out the fire.
"We've got to go after them," I said. "We've got to find them.”
"We don't have to do anything right now, Torrance.”
He opened the porch door and urged me down the steps. I didn't want to leave Graystone. I thought that by doing so, it meant I was abandoning my home when it needed me the most. In my mind — and I was probably going through some kind of shock — Graystone had become a sentient creature. Something that needed me, required my loyalty, my devotion, and my constancy. I couldn't turn my back on it now.
I allowed myself to be pulled into the middle of the backyard. The security lights, motion controlled, went on. It was a bit too much light and I blinked my eyes and turned away.
The Brood settled behind Mark, as if they expected him to defend them. I wouldn't put it past him.
"Will you stay here?" he asked. "I want to go see what's happening.”
Someone had to stay with the Brood. They’d be too frightened alone in their dog run.
“I should go, I’m the one who owns Graystone.”
I knew, by his expression, that he was willing to make a big deal of the whole thing in order to act like alpha Were.
“Okay, fine. Go. Be all macho. But if a vampire gets me, I want you to feel bad about it for the rest of your life.”
His laughter was rather insulting.
I watched as he took the path around the side of the house.
Okay, maybe I didn't really believe the vampires had done this. In fact, I was more than willing to consider my brother, Austin, the culprit. Except that it hadn't been his voice I'd heard.
I suspected, however, that they were Furries although I couldn’t say exactly why. Maybe I knew that voice from the car. The thought made me a little sick.