The Angel Stone: A Novel (3 page)

Because that’s what these frat boys undoubtedly were—nephilim, or perhaps the spawn of nephilim.

Two of them, wearing nothing but skimpy gym shorts and flip-flops, were stringing party lights along the porch railing. I recognized Adam Sinclair from class as he looked up and saw me. He whispered something to the other boy, who looked my way and laughed.

Great, now I’d become the butt of frat-boy humor. Adam waved at me. Not wanting to look like the cranky old lady neighbor I suddenly felt like, I waved back.

“Prof,” Adam yelled. “Wanna come to our party tonight?”

I held up the magenta invitation and smiled tightly. “I don’t think I have the right costume, boys.”

Adam grinned. “You could come as a fairy.”

At least he hadn’t suggested I come as a slutty fairy. “I’ll be busy grading your papers,” I replied. “Hopefully the noise won’t put me in a bad mood.”

“No worries, Prof. We’ll keep it down to a dull roar. If we’re keeping you up, though, come on over.”

“You never know,” I said, a thought occurring to me. “I might just do that.”

Several of the boys hooted at that and, as I turned around and walked across the street to Honeysuckle House, I was conscious of many sets of male eyes on my back—or probably a little lower. I was glad I’d worn a demure knee-length skirt
for the first day of classes, but still I had to concentrate on not swishing my hips. And if I felt reduced to a sex object by these boys, how must my female students feel?

Stepping onto my porch, I met another pair of accusing eyes. In the fanlight above my door, a face set in stained glass stared dolefully at me. I’d come to recognize my demon lover in those green eyes and full lips. An altercation two months ago had cracked the glass below one green eye, making it look as if the figure were shedding a single tear. Each time I saw it now, I thought of my demon lover. Sometimes I thought of him as the creature made of moonlight and shadow who had made love to me in my dreams. Sometimes I remembered Liam Doyle, the broody Irish poet who had shared my bed last winter until I banished him to the Borderlands, but mostly I pined for Bill Carey. The kind brown-eyed handyman had fixed my house and tended to the damaged pieces inside me. I’d discovered that my parents had warded me in my childhood to hide my powers from my grandmother—and then died before they could remove those wards. The wards had not only restricted my powers, they’d kept me from being able to love. Bill’s love for me—proved by throwing himself in front of Duncan Laird and taking a lethal blow meant for me—had broken the last of those wards. I’d recognized him and realized I loved him at the same moment his blood flowed onto the threshold of the door to Faerie—closing that door forever.

Gazing up into the green glass eyes, I asked the question I asked every time I looked into them: “Are you really gone?”

And always the same silence for an answer.

I sighed and opened the door. The big old Victorian house seemed to return my sigh in sympathy as floorboards creaked and curtains huffed at the windows. But it was only the breeze
I’d let in. When I closed the door, the house settled down into its hundred-year silence.

Broken by a diminutive squeak.

I looked down and saw a tiny gray field mouse, white patch on his chest, sitting at my feet. I crouched down and held out my hand.

“Hey, Ralph, have you got a message for me?”

Not that Ralph could talk, even though he was a magical doormouse imbued with a spark of the sacred fire of Muspelheim by his maker, Brock. Still, he could type on laptops and was excellent at carrying messages. He was carrying one now inside the tiny silk pouch he wore around his neck (I’d sewn it from a jewelry pouch). I tipped the pouch over and a tiny origami crane fell out—flapping its paper wings and taking a spin around the foyer.

A message from Soheila, then, I thought, cheered by the crane’s antics, despite my foul mood. I held out my hand and waited for the paper creature to alight. Experience had taught me it was fruitless to chase the little messengers. After a couple of spins around the foyer, it glided gracefully into my palm and obligingly unfolded itself.

Mission Fallen Angel in effect. Meet below Main tonight when the damned bells toll midnight
.

I laughed at the dramatic wording. Soheila may have folded the message, but it was written in Frank Delmarco’s handwriting, and the flair for the dramatic was pure Frank, who, it turned out, loved the Hardy Boys and French Resistance movies. I’d accused him more than once of enjoying the nephilim occupation a bit too much.

I read the message one more time and made sure I had it memorized. Then I tossed the paper into the air and cried,
“Flagyr!”
The paper burst into flames. The ashes formed
themselves into tiny gray cranes as they drifted down to the ground.

“I think,” I remarked to Ralph as he batted at one of the sooty cranes, “that Soheila has a little too much time on her hands these days.”

I had a few hours to kill before meeting Frank and Soheila, so I made myself a pot of tea and a fried-egg sandwich for dinner, settling down on the library couch with a stack of student papers to grade. As much as I liked teaching, I’d already learned that a stack of student papers got heavier and thicker the longer they went unread. Especially handwritten ones. Sheesh! I remembered my college professors railing about my generation’s handwriting, but this new crop of freshmen wrote as if they’d penned their essays while driving down a dirt road. I’d seen Linear B tablets that were easier to decipher. Staring at the scrawling lines made me more fatigued than I already was. I was relieved when I got to Nicky’s essay, written in neat dark ink (one of the Cinderella essays had been written in a glitter gel pen) and serviceable syntax. I read through her retelling of Tam Lin again and saw that she’d written another whole page about the variation she’d discovered in Scotland, a ballad called William Duffy.

I’d never heard of it. I considered looking it up in Sir Walter Scott’s
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
, but that was on the top shelf and I was warm and cozy on the couch. I snuggled down deeper into the cushions, pulled the afghan over my legs, and settled into the tale, delighted to be in the hands of an able storyteller.

The story begins with a young man named William Duffy, who goes to the enchanted Greenwood one Halloween night and falls in love with a fairy. They lie together in the Greenwood,
and the fairy—who’s some kind of guardian of the door to Faerie—forgets to lead her people safely through the door
.

I looked up from the paper, stunned by this detail. Last year, when the incubus had first appeared to me, I’d begun to have dreams in which I was leading a troop of fairies through a meadow, but I’d abandoned them to go into the woods with a handsome young man. Later, when I learned that I was descended from a line of fairy doorkeepers, I’d wondered if my dream was a vestigial memory of my ancestor. Now I wondered if the William Duffy story was about my ancestor. I read on.

Because the doorkeeper failed to bring her people to the door, many of her kind faded and perished. The Fairy Queen appeared and exacted a punishment for the two lovers. She banished the doorkeeper to the human world and took William Duffy to Faerie as her prisoner. The doorkeeper begged the Fairy Queen for a chance to save William, and the queen agreed. “In seven years, the host will ride out on All Hallows’ Eve with William. If you pull him down from his horse and hold on to him—even as he transforms into frightful shapes—he will be free. But if you fail to claim him, he will be sacrificed as the tithe we must pay to hell.”

The doorkeeper vows to save him. In token of her promise, she unpins a brooch from her dress. She breaks apart the brooch and hands half to William.

“Keep this as a token of my love,” she said. “My heart will be halved until we are together again.”

The Fairy Queen whisked William Duffy off to Faerie. Seven years later he rode out with the host, searching the Greenwood for his beloved to save him, but the woods were blasted as though by lightning and there was no sign of the doorkeeper
.

“Ah,” the Fairy Queen told William, “she has forsaken you. Mayhap she has been destroyed by demons. When she broke her brooch in half, she halved her power. Foolish girl! I should give you as tithe to the demons of hell, but I am not heartless. Because of the love you bore one of our kind, I will let you dwell in Faerie instead. True, you will become a demon, but if ever you are loved again, you will become human.”

I put down Nicky’s paper on the coffee table, feeling tired and sad. My incubus had been made through the foolishness of my own ancestor! I didn’t have the heart to write comments and correct grammar anymore. I closed my eyes and pictured the Greenwood where the fairy doorkeeper and William Duffy lay together. I pictured a soft bed of emerald-green moss and wild heather, dappled with leaf shadow and sunlight filtered through ancient beech trees, and a young man who looked like Bill …

“You’ve come back for me,” he said, pulling me down beside him. In the dappled leaf shadow, his face was the face of the man in the stained-glass fanlight, then Liam’s, then Bill’s. Then he was some new combination of the three. My Greenwood lover, William Duffy
.

“I never went away,” I told him, kneeling beside him on the heather bed but unwilling to let him pull me down beside him. “It’s you who went away. That monster killed you. I watched him slash your throat, and then you vanished. I thought you were dead.”

He lifted his hand to my face and brushed away a tear. “Not dead. Only trapped in Faerie, waiting for your return.”

“But the door is gone. I don’t know where there’s another.”

He shook his head and laughed—a musical sound that riffled the leaves in the beech trees and made my skin tingle. “How can you not know where the door is? The door is
here.” I looked around us at the Greenwood and saw we were in a valley. Above us a castle loomed, its ruined walls guarded by gruesome stone gargoyles. A broken stone archway, also carved with gargoyles, stood on one side of the glade
.

“But where—” I began to ask, but his arms were around me and he was pulling me down to the forest floor. His lips found mine and I forgot my questions. What mattered was that we were together and I could feel his warm hands touching me, peeling away my petticoat and long skirt, my tartan cloak—why was I wearing so many clothes?—and laying me down on the soft heather bed. He plucked a sprig of heather and brushed it along the line of my jaw, releasing its heady perfume into the air. He drew the flower lightly down my throat. I trembled at its touch … like velvet lips … and then I felt his lips on my skin, planting kisses on each breast, his teeth like the scratch of rough grass as he drew his tongue down to my navel and slipped his fingers between my legs. I cried out and arched my hips and reached for him, digging my heels into the velvet moss. I wrapped my hands into his hair and pulled his face to mine and kissed his mouth. He tasted like wild heather and peat smoke. His skin felt like furred moss and, where it was tenderest, flower petals. I drew him into me, feeling as though I were pulling it all inside me—the dappled sunlight, the mossy bed, the scent of heather. As it all burst, his green-gold eyes locked on mine and he said, “See, you knew where the hallow door was all along.”

I woke up on the couch in the darkened library, my fingers digging into the velvet cushions, my body pulsing with the force of the dream.

It was just a dream
.

The reality of that crashed over me. I hadn’t found my way into Faerie, and the man in my dream hadn’t been Liam or Bill or my demon lover. He was William Duffy, the hero of Nicky’s
ballad, summoned by a sex-deprived teacher falling asleep while grading papers.

Well,
that
was embarrassing.

I unwound myself from the tangled afghan—remembering the prickly wool of the tartan mantle I’d worn in the dream—and sat up, trying to shake off the fog of sleep. On the mantel above the fireplace, a clock chimed the hour. It was eleven o’clock. I’d slept the whole evening away, but at least I hadn’t overslept my meeting with Frank and Soheila. I got up, the afghan falling to the floor. Something else fluttered to the floor—a scrap of paper. I hoped I hadn’t been shredding my student papers in my sleep. That might be hard to explain. But when I bent down to pick up the scrap, I found it wasn’t paper at all. It was a sprig of heather.

I tucked the heather sprig between the pages of Scott’s
Scottish Minstrelsy
, where I had searched in vain for a ballad called William Duffy or any mention of a hallow door. At last, afraid I’d be late, I went upstairs, took a shower to wake myself up, and dressed in black jeans, a black turtleneck, and sturdy black work boots. I combed my long red hair back and braided it and tucked it under a black beret. Frank had given me the beret. I felt a little silly wearing it, but it hid my hair—and perhaps made me look a bit like Simone Signoret in
Army of Shadows
.

I packed a small black backpack with flashlight, compass, spell book, and Ralph. Then I crept out the back door and headed into the woods.

A hundred and twenty years ago, when Silas LaMotte had built a house for his wife, he named it Honeysuckle House after her favorite flower and planted honeysuckle shrubs all around it because she loved the scent. But his wife had died a few months after they moved into the house, and in the years that Silas’s daughter, Dahlia LaMotte, lived there, she’d been too busy writing her romance novels to worry much about the
gardens. She let the shrubs go wild. Fed by the primal magic coming from the door to Faerie, they spread into the woods, growing into a dense, twisting bramble that perfumed the whole town in summer.

Or at least it had. When the door to Faerie was closed, the woods were blighted. Flowers died on the vine, and now their leaves hung yellowed and dry, like scorched paper. The bare branches resembled bones in the moonlight. Ducking under a low arch, I felt as if I were passing through the skeletal jaws of an extinct sea monster …