Authors: Christine Warren
A twist of her wrist made the cabin door swing open on well-oiled hinges. Looked like the caretaker was doing his job.
Ella stepped forward into the dark space and inhaled. She felt assaulted by the familiar odors of cedar and pine, beeswax and lemon. Even the trace of dust in the air smelled natural, the same scent that had greeted her family at the start of every summer when they first opened the cabin for the season. It was just as she remembered.
Her hand trembled as she reached out, her fingers going unerringly to the light switch just inside the door. The single light fixture in the center of the room blinked on and illuminated Ella’s childhood in all its braided rug and battered wooden glory.
Her heart squeezed painfully.
Behind her, Kees stood—a large, silent, and somehow comforting presence—but she couldn’t turn to look at him. Not yet. She needed a minute to think, to process, to get ahold of herself.
She never thought she’d be coming back here.
“I’ll go outside and get our things,” he said in his low, gravelly I’m-being-nice voice.
Ella just nodded until she heard his footsteps move off the porch and onto the pine-needled earth of the tiny front yard clearing.
Every summer of her childhood, from her earlier memories until her parents died, Ella had spent days and weeks in this very spot. The small cabin on the east coast of the Sechelt Peninsula, north of the eponymous town, sat nestled in the forest, opposite Seal Cove at the base of Mount Richardson. It lay on the other side of the almost island from the Sunshine Coast that flooded with tourists and outdoors lovers every time the weather warmed, but it occupied a world away in almost every manner imaginable.
Ella’s grandfather had built the cabin in the 1950s, taking years to complete the work of digging a well and contriving a septic system in the remote, nearly inaccessible area. He’d forgone electricity and all but the most basic plumbing for the peace and beauty of the Canadian woodlands. Ella’s mother used to say she’d fallen in like with the place the first time she saw it. The addition of the generator and screens on the windows to keep out the insects had sent “like” blooming into full-blown love.
Her parents had been happiest out here, away from their serious academic careers, with nothing to do but be and think and breathe in the peace all around them. Ella’s dad said some of his best research grew out of ideas that came to him at the cabin, while he walked or fished or just sat watching the seals and the oystermen across the inlet. Nature, he had said, was the mother of all scientific thought.
Stephen Harrow had been a scientist to his core, a man who believed in what he could see or what he could prove with tidy equations printed on crisp white paper. He had never believed in magic. Neither had his wife. Marian had the soul of a teacher, and she believed in what she could analyze and explain. Neither of them had quite believed in Ella.
They had loved her. She always knew they loved her, but they had never quite believed her.
Kees reentered the cabin with Ella’s duffel swung over his shoulder and one arm balancing a box full of grocery staples that Ella knew for a fact had to weigh close to forty pounds. He held it like it contained nothing more than a loaf of bread and a bag of air-popped popcorn.
“Where do I put these?”
Ella pointed to the right to the small kitchen half tucked away behind the front closet. “In there. It will take a little while before the fridge cools down, but now that the generator is on, we can start using it. There should be plenty of room in the cupboards, if they’re not completely empty. I suppose there could be a can of chili or something hiding up there, but it should be fine.”
She was babbling, and she knew it, but she couldn’t help it. She was running on the last punchy fumes of adrenaline, yet she didn’t know how she was going to sleep tonight, not after what had happened in her apartment earlier.
Not here.
She heard cabinet doors flipped open and closed, heard the sound of items settling on the wire refrigerator racks, then the door of the appliance sealing shut. Kees stepped back into the main room and found her standing exactly where he’d left her.
A shiver ran through her, and he frowned. “You’re cold.”
Ella started to protest that she was fine, but thought better of it. The cabin had no central heating, so even if she wasn’t registering the temperature now, she knew she would eventually, and unless they got a fire started, that temperature would be
cold
.
“Right.” She nodded. “There’s kindling in the firebox but the woodshed’s out back, on the opposite side from the generator. I’ll go get some.”
“I’ll get it. Sit down.” He pinned her with an intent gaze. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”
“Gee, thanks,” Ella grumped, but she sat.
Kees left the cabin again, and she huddled on the edge of the sofa wondering what the hell had happened to her life. Thinking about the surreal horror movie her present had turned into at least kept her mind off the past.
Ella had killed a man today, and no matter what Kees told her, no matter what logic or reason told her, living with that truth would never be easy. She understood that the man had been a servant of the Darkness; she understood that he had intended to kill her and that after he killed her, he had intended to help summon a pack of demons that would subsequently kill the rest of humanity. She even understood that she had killed him only because the murderous spell he’d cast at her had rebounded on him. But she was the one who’d sent that spell back, and he was the one who’d died. She didn’t quite know how to process that.
In truth, she felt mostly numb at the moment. Maybe it was shock, maybe it was exhaustion, and maybe it was just her mind finally rebelling after having spent the last week plus trying to wrap itself around the reality of too many things that shouldn’t have been real. Or it could be a combination of all those things, but all Ella knew was that at the moment all she could feel was a great big blank, like a hole in the center of her body. It stretched from her heart to her belly, encompassing everything in its path and sucking the sensation out of all of it.
Guilty, she realized it was almost a relief.
If she couldn’t feel guilt over killing a man or grief over the memory of her lost parents or fear at being hunted by the
nocturnis,
at least she also couldn’t feel confusion over her relationship with Kees. Provided it even was a relationship. Her head felt too foggy and too heavy to answer even that simple question. Well, deceptively simple maybe.
Ella knew that she had run from the apartment that morning—God, had it only been that morning?—out of fear. What she and Kees shared during the night had been glorious, and she couldn’t stand taking the chance that he would turn cold again. Her heart couldn’t take giving itself to him so completely if he woke up a second time and told her he felt nothing for her. It had hurt too much before; a repetition might have killed her.
So she had run, like a frightened little bunny, thinking that if she put up the walls instead of him, maybe it wouldn’t feel like one of the barriers had collapsed on top of her.
It hadn’t worked.
Instead of being tormented by being pushed away, now Ella felt the torment of doubt. What if he hadn’t intended to push her away? What if their lovemaking had finally convinced him that he did feel something for her and she had ruined it by pulling the same stupid stunt he’d used on her?
Exhaustion made her brain too tired to answer those questions. She knew that Kees had greeted her eagerly and possessively when she returned from work that night, but had he meant it, or had that been a show he put on for the benefit of the police? He remained mostly quiet on the drive up from Vancouver, but he’d never been much of a talker. Had that been the silent treatment, or just the taciturn nature of a man who spent most of his existence locked in a cage of stone?
And, God, was there even the slightest chance she would figure any of this out before she fell flat on her face with weariness?
She had just enough energy to look toward the door and watch as Kees stepped back inside carrying what looked like half the woodpile. One of the benefits of supernatural strength, she supposed.
He deposited his burden in the box beside the hearth and began to stack kindling in the grate.
Ella braced her hands on the sofa cushions and gathered her strength to rise. “I can do that,” she offered. “You carried everything in. The least I can do is build a fire.”
He shot her a straight-lipped glance over his shoulder, amusement glinting in his eyes. “I think I can handle it. Having lived in more than one age when fire was the only available source of either light or heat.”
“Right. Sometimes I forget about that.”
She watched as he efficiently got the kindling blazing and added the smallest pieces of wood. He had shifted sometime since their arrival at the cabin, and Ella realized with foggy-headed surprise that she hadn’t even noticed. She knew he had remained in his human form in the car, both in case anyone saw them during the drive and because that way he just fit better within the small, confined space. Now, though, he knelt before the hearth in his natural shape, which meant Ella had missed his shift. She wondered if he had just done it on the last trip outside, and then realized that it didn’t matter, which was precisely why she hadn’t noticed.
To Ella, Kees was Kees, no matter what form he took. To her, it was all the same, just as she told him before they had made love. Her heart didn’t recognize the difference in his forms, and apparently her eyes and her mind had followed suit. She loved her Guardian no matter what he looked like, horns and all.
Hearing her own giggle burst into the quiet cabin told Ella better than words how bone-tired she really was. She’d gone from merely exhausted to positively loopy.
Apparently, Kees had noticed as well.
She felt his arms slide around her, one curling against her back, the other curving behind her knees. He lifted her off the sofa and cradled her against his chest before Ella noticed that she hadn’t seen him coming. This time, she knew exactly why she’d missed the important details—because her eyes had drifted shut. She was already half asleep.
She thought about telling him where the bedroom was, but realized that in a four-room cabin, he wasn’t likely to miss it. Her faith proved justified when he lowered her onto the wide, soft mattress and laid her back against the pillows. Ella immediately snuggled onto her side and reached for the blankets. The bedroom was chilly without the fire, though she knew it would warm up quickly provided the bedroom door remained open.
Her last conscious memories were of her gargoyle carefully pulling her shoes from her feet and tucking the quilts up around her. It felt good, sweet and tender and loving. As she drifted off to sleep, the only thing she could have wished for was that he actually meant it.
* * *
Ella woke screaming. Choking. Suffocating. Pinned beneath heavy debris, her senses overwhelmed with the smells of burned rubber, gasoline, and blood.
She was twelve years old again, and she had just killed her parents.
“Ella! Ella!”
Someone shouted her name. The sound of it registered because it shouldn’t exist. No one had called for her. Everyone who knew her name was dead. She had killed them.
“Ella, wake up. Now!”
Her eyes opened, and she whimpered. She saw no trees, no sky, no twisted pieces of metal. The smell of blood faded. Nothing pained her. Her flesh bore no cuts, no bone-deep contusions. She was awake, she was twenty-seven, and she was back at her parents’ cabin.
Her stomach lurched and she shoved hard at the figure hovering over her. She needed the bathroom. Now.
She ran, knelt, heaved. Her stomach revolted, attempting over and over to throw itself out her open mouth. Or, at least, that was what it felt like. She had nothing much to vomit. She’d never gotten dinner last night. She’d been too busy killing a man.
Again, she heaved.
Behind her, she felt Kees’s presence. The gargoyle stood in the door to the small bathroom, barely squeezing himself inside. She wanted to shout at him to leave her alone. To go away. To take the car and go, drive himself somewhere else and leave her here, out in the woods. Where she couldn’t hurt anyone else. Ever.
Tears streamed down her face, and she knew they weren’t caused only by the violent spasms of nausea. She tried to choke back the sobs, but that only made her sick again. Her arms clasped the rim of the toilet bowl and she wanted, more than anything else, to die.
A hand, huge but achingly gentle, reached out and gathered the strands of her hair, pulling it out of the way. The side of a lethally sharp claw scraped tenderly against her skin as it moved the tendrils that tears and saliva had glued to her cheeks. The touch felt like a benediction, cool against her flushed face, gentle and loving, and that only made Ella weep harder.
She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve to be loved.
She retched again, her empty stomach convulsing painfully, but she had nothing left to bring up now. Not even bile came out. She spit weakly and sank back onto her heels. Laying her forehead against the cool toilet seat, she shook and ached and wept.
“Shh, sweet girl,” Kees crooned. “Poor little human. Come on, now. I’ve got you.”
His arms came around her, gathering her up against his chest. She fought his touch at first, but she felt drained of strength, and he seemed not to even notice her feeble struggles. He cradled her close and carried her back into the bedroom. Once again, he laid her down on the cool, crisp sheets and stood.
Ella lay still. She had her eyes closed, blocking out everything. She felt chilled, almost freezing, but she didn’t reach for the quilt, didn’t try to cover herself. She just lay there, stiff and silent, and the tears continued to roll down her cheeks.
An instant later, she felt the bed dip. Kees sat down beside her and slid an arm beneath her shoulders, raising her slightly. The cool edge of a drinking glass touched her lips.