Wolves at the Door - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,69

of me.

“How do you look so calm?” I asked Graham. “Did you know we were about to die?”

“I’m not sure I was thinking at all,” he said.

“So…you were testing me?” I asked the Ethereal.

“Yes,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you were willing to risk your life to help Byron bring the worlds back together. And after all of that, I’m feeling much better about your chances. Not just you, but your lovers and friends as well. My appearance to Shoshanna was also a test. I gave her a vision of the future where the Ethereal witches could learn to work with the other realms. She took it as a prophecy of horror and immediately summoned up her fellow witches to stop you. I’m going to strip all of them of their connection to Etherium. So that’s four less you have to worry about…”

“You’re an Ethereal, but you want the walls between worlds to come down?”

“I’m Byron’s sister Marisa,” she said. “Half-sister, that is. We were both born of an Ethereal mother, but his father was a high demon. But how I loved my baby brother! So maybe my perspective is a little different.”

“So you must know where his body is,” Graham said.

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us? Or are your lips also sewn shut?”

“I’m not dead!” she said. “No, I won’t tell you anything. It’s important that he tells you himself.”

“Why?” Graham said. “That just seems like a lot of unnecessary work for—”

I squeezed his hand. “It’s no use, Graham. She won’t tell us. That’s how the magical realms are.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s because we have to figure things out on our own,” I said. “If you ever have to actually go there, you just expect that you have to solve riddles and take on side quests and demonstrate random feats of bravery and selflessness…” I shrugged. “Fairy tales aren’t considered fiction in the magical world, they’re travel guides.”

“It’s not that,” Marisa said. “It’s really that Byron will be so mad at me if he doesn’t get to tell the story himself.” She gave him an impish smile. “I won’t take that power from him.”

“It’s really still the first reason,” I whispered to Graham.

Jake and Jasper had gotten their jeans back on and were walking out from the smokehouse to join the party.

“Did you catch that?” I asked them.

“Most of it,” Jasper said. “So…that’s it?”

“You won,” Marisa said. “Thanks to me. Now…all you need to do is find the last piece of Pandora’s Box.”

“You’re really patting yourself on the back,” Byron said. “Are you going to help us when the council inevitably attacks us at Sam’s house? No. You won’t. Go home.”

“I can’t!” she said. “You know I can’t interfere with the box itself. That has to be you. The sword can only be pulled from the stone by one hand, and so it goes.”

“I know,” Byron said.

“Hey, at least we’re getting somewhere,” Jake said. “But the next house…is it up for sale yet?”

“It will be,” Byron said, a bit darkly.

“Of course, all we need is the piece of the box,” Graham said. “We don’t actually have to buy the house to get it. We stole this one before Billie showed up.”

“Good point. But if I can get a house at a bargain, a girl still has to make a living somehow,” I said. “This time, Billie and I won’t fight each other over it. So Billie and Gaston are all right?” I said. “We should probably check on them! They haven’t shown up since they rode out the driveway…”

“They’ll be fine,” Marisa said. “I cast a protection spell on all of you so that you could be hurt but not killed, just in case things got out of hand. If anything happened to them, I can heal them as I healed Bevan. Then, I will take my leave.”

“That’s a relief,” I said.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Billie

“You must’ve had a lot adventures in your day,” I said to Gaston as we were riding down well-worn paths through fields and groves on our moonlight ride some days ago.

“Not really,” he said. “I try to avoid adventures.”

“I thought all vampires had adventures.”

“You know that feeling you get when you’re just watching a sunset or something? You think, it’s good to be right here, today, and I don’t need anything else.”

“Of course.”

“Well, I’d rather be a boring vampire and just have that feeling. That’s why I’ve just been the groundskeeper for Greenwood all these many years. The family lived a long time and the garden is enough for