Trueheart (Portland After Dark Book 1) (15 page)

Thomas put an arm around her. "A bogle. It would have called Hunter down on us." No point in telling her it was two bogles. That would only magnify her already epic sense of guilt and responsibility. "There's no way to know for certain it's dead. They're tough little bastards. It might have just been hurt."

"A...bogle."

"Something like a redcap, only not so bloodthirsty. A nasty little tattletale."

She shuddered. Thomas gently moved the stone away from her eye. "Don't keep staring at it, Tess. It wasn't your fault."

She blinked rapidly and Thomas saw a tear slip from the corner of her eye before she wiped it away and set her mouth in a firm line. "Well. I guess if you're done, we should get home."

"We should leave town."

"You keep saying that, and I'm going to keep telling you no. So just...get in the car. And this time put on your seatbelt."

Thomas did as he was told, hiding a smile. For as long as it lasted, he'd relish having her cluck over him, even if she was angry and scared and heartsick.

––––––––

T
homas's sense of unease reawakened as the Jeep turned northwest. The roads gradually climbed in altitude. His unease increased as they left the square blocks of city streets, businesses and apartment buildings behind for twisty lanes and more trees. Tess at last pulled into the blacktop driveway of a duplex and killed the engine. Thomas's heart sank. He knew the long, dark lump of earth rising like an elephant's spine behind her home.

Forest Park.

The fairy mound.

The Queen's own demesne.

"Fuck," he sighed, defeated.

"What's the matter now?"

"Nothing. Let's just...get you under cover."

They hurried to the front door, where an unlit, smiling pumpkin greeted them toothlessly from an overturned bushel basket on the tiny porch. A shock of dry cornstalks rustled as his shoulder brushed it. Tess unlocked the door and pushed it open. Thomas peered up and down the dark street behind them and saw nothing. He followed her into the house, where Tess was turning on every light in the place. He came behind her, turning them all off again. He could see to the back of the house, where the windows looked out over the black, ivy-choked bulk of Forest Park. Too much light, where any passing fae might peer in, would raise the alarm yet again.

"What are you doing? I need light, damn it! Tonight's been the scariest, darkest night I've ever—"

"Light inside means what's outside can see in." He flicked off the light in the kitchen and strode to the window over the sink, yanking down the blind.

"Oh." Tess's voice was small and frightened. "We left them behind, didn't we?"

"They're everywhere, including that lump of land behind your house. I didn't want to mention it while we were outside where anything could hear. Come on, help me close up. Then you can turn on lights. I promise."

Tess's house smelled like her. Thomas wanted to close his eyes and wallow in the bliss of womanly fragrances like clean laundry, perfumed soap, and the good smells of bread and milk and coffee. It smelled like what he remembered from centuries ago when his mother loved and cared for him, and later when the sweet, bold ladies of frontier Portland craved his strong body in bed. He moved from window to window while Tess turned in a circle in the darkened kitchen, watching him, wringing her hands.

Finished, he put his hands on her shoulders. "Don't. Come on now. You've been so strong. Don't quit. Is there an upstairs?"

She nodded, gulping.

"Show me."

"This is all so hard. So crazy."

"I know. Do we go down the hall?" He herded her gently back to where he'd seen stairs as they came in the front door. Once she was moving, she seemed better able to continue and led him up the stairs to a small landing where three doors revealed bedrooms and a bath. She reached out of habit for the light switch, but Thomas stayed her hand.

The bathroom's window was already screened by a hazy plastic film to diffuse outside light yet not permit peeping. There was no other window covering, so Thomas reached over the tub and drew the shower curtain across to block what it could. On the other side of the landing was a room filled with bookshelves and a big desk and armchair. Thomas tugged its beige brocaded drapery closed.

That left only her bedroom, and Tess went inside herself to close the curtains, pushing some clothing lying on the floor under her bed. Then her strength seemed to leave her, and she sagged onto the edge of the bed, her hands loose in her lap. Thomas fidgeted in the doorway. In the dimness, her face gleamed like the underside of a mushroom, pale and tender. She looked up at him, her dark eyes enormous and sad. She clutched the stone where it lay between her breasts.

"Go on, look at me through it, if you want." Irritation, born of his fury at having involved her in this mess, roughened his voice. "I'm no different than I've been since you met me. I'm a big, ugly, smelly trow who can sometimes squeeze himself into a human skin for a little while."

She looked down, abashed. "It's not you. I just...do you know how it feels to realize you're going crazy? My whole life just turned into one of my clients' hallucinations."

"It was like that for me, as well, many years ago. All I can tell you is you're not hallucinating. I'm real. The fae are real. The danger is real."

Tess's laugh was bitter. "I use a magic rock to see reality, Thomas. There's no way I'm not crazy. And I may have killed someone tonight." Her voice broke on the last word.

Thomas, galvanized once more by her sadness, hesitated on the threshold of her bedroom and at last plunged across it. He stood awkwardly by the bed, not sure what to do with his hands but wanting nothing more than to comfort her. Tess solved the dilemma by leaning hard against him, burrowing beneath his grubby, damp oilskin. As her arms linked behind his waist, Thomas shrugged out of the coat and let it slump like a cast-off selkie skin to the floor. He could tell she wanted to be held much closer. With a stifled groan he sank onto the bed next to her and let her push her wet face into the angle of his neck and shoulder. A few minutes later her sobbing increased, and somehow in the effort to comfort her, he stretched out on the bed—ignoring the mess his boots must be making of the bedding—and curled her close in the bend of his body, because it seemed to help.

Heaven, for a little while, with her in his arms. As long as he could manage it, to make them both safe. It was only a matter of time before the Queen called for him. But in the meantime, heaven, in a darkened room in a human house on the edge of the fairy mound.

T
HE
MORNING LIGHT SEEMED GLOOMIER
than usual, even for the rainy days before Halloween. The front of Tess's body was chilled, but her back was furnace-warm, as was a stripe across her belly. She blinked and groped with her feet to find the blankets and pull them up, but the hard sole of her boot knocked against her shin. She must have fallen asleep with her clothes on. She smelled something meaty and warm, and very masculine, giving a vague impression of stew and childhood comfort foods.

Tess opened her eyes slowly. The warmth across her belly came from a bulky arm and a rawboned hand with large, scraped knuckles. It held her prisoner on the bed.

A trow hand. She remembered everything in a rush of renewed terror. She shuddered, turning to look over her shoulder, and found trow-Thomas huddled against her back, the long line of his big body warming hers from behind. His eyes were closed, and after the first few seconds her heart rate settled. Taken all together, his features formed an unappealing whole. A nose like a turnip. Eyebrows that would have shamed the woolliest of caterpillars. A forehead that was flat and broad, above high, blunt cheekbones. A mouth slack with sleep, fleshy and red, betokening a hunger for foods Tess would rather not think about. A chin like a bulldog's, but startlingly hairless, with roughened, pebbly skin. And that sparse stripe of hair down the middle of his head.

In the midst of that, Thomas's all-too-human eyes, too small for the scale of his trow face, dark-lashed and closed in sleep. They gave him a piggish look, set as they were near the snout-like nose. He was the source of the comforting scent, too. What a collection of incongruities, as though he had been constructed of spare parts.

She grabbed his hand to move his arm and escape him, and suddenly Thomas was fully awake and aware. There was the barest instant when Tess
knew
he would not let her go. She could sense a vast hunger and need within him—and then he was rolling away from her, the trow-form fading as he moved. Tess got to her feet, feeling safer with the bed between them.

"I guess we fell asleep." His voice was somewhere between trow and human, rough and deep, and strangely attractive. He looked up at the window, where a wedge of gray light seeped past the edge of the blind. "Is that the sun?"

"It's nearly seven thirty," Tess replied, pretending everything was normal; just a human girl accustomed to waking up with supernatural creatures in her bed.

Thomas pulled his hand over his face. "Morning."

"Ye-e-s..." She watched, fascinated, as the stripe of hair down his head and his neck—
does it go all the way down his spine? I wonder how muscular his back is—
seemed to vanish beneath the skin while Thomas's close-cropped haircut reappeared. In moments he was just a man in ill-fitting clothes sitting on the other side of the bed, flexing his hands and looking at their raw palms.

He turned to look at her. The last of the turnip nose had vanished, and there was only Thomas's bruised face. Even the bruises were fading, but his skin still showed enough mottling to remind her of an exhausted prize-fighter. With his shift in form, the odor diminished as well. "Dawn means I can't go home. I'm trapped."

Tess blinked. "What?"

"Trow-holds seal shut when sunlight strikes them. I can't go home until dusk."

"What are you now, a vampire or something?"

"Vampires aren't real." He groped at his upper left arm, frowning.

Tess snorted. "But trolls—excuse me,
trows
—and bogles and redcaps are?"

"Mock away. Deny the evidence of your own eyes." He kept prodding at his arm, and finally Tess gestured at it.

"Are you all right?"

Thomas shrugged. "Just wondering why she hasn't summoned me, is all. I would have thought..."

"She?"

"The Queen of the Unseelie court."

"Queen of the Unseelie—" Tess stopped herself, shaking her head. "I need coffee." She stumped away down the stairs, half surprised Thomas didn't follow, though he did call after her.

"Leave the blinds closed."

In the shuttered kitchen, she put bread in the toaster and ground beans for coffee. Upstairs she heard water running, and then the shower. In spite of herself, she smiled. She could use a shower herself. She was grungy after the frightening evening and sleeping in her clothes. The perverse and capricious imp that lived in her brain suggested Thomas might not be averse to her joining him in the shower, but the part of Tess that was still struggling with her new reality pointed out that what was in the shower was not exactly human.

By the time the toast popped up, the shower had stopped. And only a few seconds after she had smeared the toast with butter and strawberry jam, Thomas appeared in the doorway, with his oilskin over his arm. The coffee maker gurgled its last, and she filled a mug, adding a little milk. She looked a question at Thomas, who was staring at the quart of milk.

"Oh, yes, please," he said, reaching, but not for the coffee. He took the milk jug from her hand and tipped it up, drinking straight from the spout. Swallow after swallow went down, and in a few seconds the quart was empty. When he noticed her open-mouthed stare, he looked sheepish, and coughed a little. "The...uh, the fae like milk. A lot. Warmed, if possible."

"No wonder you like your lattes with only one shot of espresso in twenty ounces of milk. I thought caffeine bothered you." She opened the fridge, brought out another carton of milk, and filled a large mug, which she put into the microwave to heat. She gestured him toward the table shared by both dining room and kitchen, and put the toast in front of him. He laid the oilskin over the back of a chair, sat down, and set to with gusto. Tess realized she'd better make more toast, as well. While the microwave and toaster worked, she leaned against the counter and said meditatively, "So I'm making breakfast for a trow."

"Wasn't that on your list for someday?" Thomas asked, with a tentative smile. "Now you can mark it complete."

Tess buttered the next round of toast and put in two more slices. She brought her breakfast to the table and sat down. "I think we have a lot to talk about, don't we, Thomas?" She fingered the stone, still on its thong around her neck.

"You still need to be convinced the fae exist?"

"Nnnnooo, but...why do you keep insisting they're after us? We've just...um, spent the whole night together, and nothing came to break down the door."

"I don't think they were able to track us last night, and now that the sun's up, they'll be slowed even more. They can do a lot more in Portland after dark."

"But you were expecting someone—the Queen? to call you. Or something. What was it you said?"

"Summon." He wolfed down the last bite of toast and looked longingly toward her own plate.

"I'm making more, if you can just be patient. Summon you how?"

"She has a way of calling me. I don't know why she hasn't, that's what I don't understand."

"You know her."

"We all do."

"You say 'we' like you're one of the fae, yet you told me you're not like them. Which is it?"

Thomas pushed away from the table, scowling. He prowled to the window above the sink and lifted the corner of the blind to peer out. "It's hard to explain."

"Try. If you want me to believe you, you have to
try
." The toast popped up, and as she was buttering it, the microwave beeped. She gestured for Thomas to get the milk. He opened the microwave tentatively, as if it might bite him, and reached inside. He sat down again and bent over the mug to luxuriate in the scent of the hot milk. Now that she was seeing his behavior through new eyes—the eyes that knew he was something other than human—she found it odd, instead of curious or charming. All the little mismatches of conversation and action were starting to fall into place. No phone, no car. He didn't want her seeing his home. His insistence on walking around Underbridge, rather than through it. Wanting the windows in the Jeep rolled down. Sudden appearances and disappearances.