my back.
“Sure.”
“They’ll follow you. As long as you keep the status quo, which is easier than getting status in the first place, you’re head dick. You can pick and choose who you want on your team. But listen…” He pulled me back, his face not far from mine, his breath smelling of spearmint and honey. “If you leave these grounds to train, you call me, okay? You shouldn’t have had mages waiting in the trees to take a shot at you. I’m your ground man. My job is to take out the problem before there is a problem. But you need to call me so I know what’s going on. If it weren’t for those gargoyles showing up in the final moment…”
“Ivy House sent them…somehow, but yeah, I hear you. We don’t even know how people knew where I’d be.”
A vein jumped in his jaw as he clenched his teeth. “That’s one of the questions I’ll be trying to answer.”
“How’d you know to come? You were on the way before I called you. How’d you know?”
The vein in his jaw jumped again and fire kindled in his eyes. “Ivy House knows the trick to get me moving. Or at least checking in…” He shook his head. “This damn house is too adaptable for its own good.”
With that, he strode past me and out the door, not looking back.
“What’d you do?” I asked Ivy House quietly, a little embarrassed by my tendency to talk to the house like it was alive. Talking to myself was one thing…
The wooden carvings along the arch formed by the meeting of the stairs started moving. The house did this sometimes—it sent me messages via moving pictures in the carvings. I didn’t talk about it much with the others. If this whole thing turned out to be an elaborate joke one day, I didn’t want a stack of evidence against my mental stability.
A woman with a bare bust and flowing hair galloped across the scene on horseback. Ghastly creatures swooped down at her with long claws and sharp fangs. Animals lunged for her war-horse, its head leaned forward with speed, not distracted. She turned, spear in hand, and looked down at me, the battle raging around her.
I stood transfixed, feeling fire spread through my blood, watching as wings sprouted from her back, snapping out to the sides and moving faster and faster, beating at the wind. She rose from her horse, and then it dropped out of view as the wooden scene shifted from ground to sky. Spear still in hand, one leg bent and one down, her posture proud and magnificent, she gave me a thumbs-up, and I felt rather than saw a little smirk and a wink.
“Tricky little bitch,” I said with a grin, unable to help laughing. Austin was being dominated by a house, and while I didn’t know how, I knew it pissed him off. It pissed him off, and Ivy House was gloating about that fact.
“I’m definitely going to the loony bin,” I said as I tore my gaze away from the triumphant woman in the wooden carving and went off to join the others. “I’m rooting on a house in a battle of wills with a man that turns into a polar bear. Somewhere along the line I’ve hit my head and now I’m living in fantasy land. I’m probably in a straitjacket in a padded room as I mutter about knives named Cheryl…”
My mumbles dried up, along with all the spit in my mouth, when I walked into the sitting room they’d chosen for the meeting.
My gaze immediately went to the man at the back of the room. He had dark, tousled hair, a midnight five o’clock shadow, a strong jaw, and a straight, narrow nose. His eyes, the lids naturally heavy, as though he were plotting something, flicked my way. In the next moment, his body position shifted minimally, enough to alert everyone in the room that he’d torn focus away from them and was now devoting it all to me.
A hush settled on the room as the others followed his lead, and in that moment I knew. He was the large gargoyle with the incredible wingspan. This was the guy who had saved my life, protected me from the reaching branches, and cut himself up in the briars so I wouldn’t get scratched. This was my knight in shining armor. This incredibly hot guy, in his mid-thirties, was under my command.
The breath left my chest and a