Wolves at the Door - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,34

could see where they were all headed.

I counted seven more but I heard some commotion in the backyard too. Were more coming?

“These are probably Sinistral scouts!” I said. “They’re like ants. We have to kill them or they’ll report back to Ursula.”

Billie got the joke and laughed. They reminded me of the eels in the Little Mermaid. (A movie I was only allowed to watch at a ‘trashy’ friends’ house, because we didn’t own a television, but I remembered from our brief friendship that Billie got all the animated movies she wanted as a kid. She was what my mother would have certainly considered a trashy friend. And they got all the fun.)

“There are more in the backyard!” she said, blasting another one of the remaining three. The grass smoked.

“Don’t light anything on fire!” I cried. “I’m going to circle around and check out the back. Keep these two busy.” The remaining two were headed for Billie anyway, so I dashed between the house and the outdoor kitchen, praying I could handle what I would find.

The swans and the serpents were doing battle and it looked like the swans were winning. Two of them had a serpent in their beaks and they tore it in half before swooping down and ganging up on another serpent that was trying to escape. The serpent let out a sound that was half-hiss, half-rasping roar as the swans rent it to pieces.

I watched in horror as the Ethereal swan monsters (at this point, they seemed as monstrous as anything) destroyed the Sinistrals. This reminded me of some of the weird, grim classic paintings on the walls of Ladywald, my childhood home. It seemed like one of those metaphorical things. “Ah, this is meant to represent the Bavarian warlocks killing the forces of the high demon Moloch in 1643,” I could imagine my mother saying.

The swans finished off the Sinistrals and settled back on the gravestones. They all looked at me as if challenging me.

Maybe they wanted me to thank them?

I was completely unnerved by their eyes, black as coal.

I bowed. “Thank you.”

Then I ran back around to the side of the house to catch my breath a little.

I couldn’t sell the house with the creepy graveyard swans. If the faeries bought this place, they could expect more attacks from monsters and it would be their job to fend them off, but right now I had monster swans just chilling like they intended to take over the house themselves.

But they were Ethereal spirits, and I was an Ethereal witch, so if I attacked them, they could poof off to Etherium and I might be brought before the council. Billie, too. I wasn’t supposed to attack allies. Then they would surely look into our other business and take Pandora’s Box and the books of Arcana.

Oh, crap. I was so shaky and nothing had even really happened. I just couldn’t shake the sight of how easily the swans tore up their enemies.

“Byron…,” I whispered. “Byron, are you here?”

“Always.” His voice was just behind me. Then his arms circled me. For a moment, he was solid, knowing what I needed, giving me a strong embrace, his arms locked around me like a wall that would protect me from danger. I wanted to melt into that embrace, but I didn’t dare. He couldn’t be with me in this way. Only in dreams could we touch for long.

He had to let go all too soon, with an almost imperceptible sigh. “They scared you,” he said.

“A little bit. It’s silly, but…I didn’t expect super battle swans. What are those things? Why are they hanging around?”

“To fight you for the house,” he said.

I never knew when Byron could answer a question. Usually, the answers fell within the bounds of his curse and he couldn’t tell me anything. “Fight me?”

“I’m afraid so. But you’ll win. You must win.”

“What kind of a mad quest are you sending me on?”

“The very maddest kind.” He smiled. “But if you succeed, I will reward you for the rest of your life. And I think you already know that I am good at rewards. But you’ve only had a small taste so far. I will worship you as a demigod worships his goddess.”

I snorted. “If you were a demigod, at least it would explain why you can be so cheesy.”

“And you love every minute of it.” His golden eyes drew in my soul, eyes so captivating that nearly every thought left my head except how long it had