“Earth would be a good starter trip?”
He nodded some more, but this time, he was more animated. “I’m glad he did. It’s so interesting here. Home is beautiful, but nothing ever happens. I’ve only been here a short time, yet there’s been so much, well, happening.”
“We like to stay busy.”
Gessa rolled her eyes. I kicked her under the table. She stole my last cookie in retaliation, and I still had coffee left. I sipped it resentfully, and Soini looked back and forth between the two of us, apparently confused.
“So, you’re doing the tourist thing?” I asked. And got more confusion in return. “You’re here to explore, maybe take some pictures,” I rephrased.
“I—well, my father does want me to get more experience, but so far, the others haven’t let me out of the yard—”
Gessa opened her mouth. I kicked her again. She grinned unrepentantly and chewed at me.
“—but it’s mostly that I have a . . . sort of talent.”
“A talent?”
“Yes, a rare gift among my people,” he said, looking confident for the first time. “At least, it is these days. They say there used to be more of us, but some skills have diminished. But it’s thought to be really useful—”
“Useful how? What do you do?”
“It’s difficult to explain. It’s usually described as a kind of far-seeing, but that’s not really very accurate. I mean, we do see far, but—”
“So you’re a clairvoyant?”
“What? Oh, no, no—”
“Because Gessa here reads runes. Don’t you, Gessa?”
She shook her head at me, her mouth full of stolen cookie.
“What do you mean, no? You read mine a week ago—”
She swallowed. “Stinky take.”
“Take what? The stones?”
She nodded.
“He didn’t eat them, did he?”
“No, not eat.” She thought about it for a moment. “Probably.”
I sighed. With Stinky, that was the best assurance anyone could give. “Then what did he do with them?”
Gessa ate the last bite and hopped off her stool. “Come.”
I’d finished my coffee, and all the cookies were gone, so I followed her out of the kitchen. And across the hall, into the living room we rarely used, because the garden was roomier. And less full of dusty old furniture that never got any less dusty, because of one of those spells Claire’s uncle had put in place.
It was supposed to be a housekeeping spell, which would have been great, except that it didn’t exactly clean things. It just kept them the way they’d been when it was first laid, and Claire’s uncle had apparently had an inability to see dirt—or dust, at least. So the spell would clean up a dropped soda, for instance, if you left it there long enough, but afterward, the old boards would still have as much dust on them as before.
It infuriated Claire, who was a bit of a neatnik, but the house didn’t care. The spell had taught it to see the vaguely tidy but sort of old and dusty interior as the perfect version of the world, and by God, it was going to stay that way. Forever.
Gessa, however, didn’t seem to mind the dust, or the ugly furniture, or the fussy drapes, and of course the boys only cared that the TV worked. As a result, the living room had become a playroom that was more toy strewn by the day, including the large cardboard box in the corner that Gessa was now peering inside of. And swearing loudly.
“What is it?” I asked, hurrying over.
The sides of the box had been decorated with taped-on pieces of paper with bright blue skies, fluffy white clouds, and rich green hills scribbled on them. And at the bottom was a chessboard that had been a gift from Olga, and had become the boys’ favorite toy, although not because either of them was interested in strategy. They just liked to watch the fights.
And, since this was a troll board, that’s exactly what they got. One side was made up of angry little ogres and the other of tiny pissed-off trolls, which had been enchanted to be pretty darn lifelike. The board was enchanted, too, to ensure that the two groups didn’t see a cardboard cell, but rather a large, rolling world in miniature, full of open fields, shaded grottos, and velvety forests. A world they would battle to the death to defend.
Or, at least, to the end of the game.
Only, lately, that time never came, because the boys never put their toys away. So instead of chess we’d ended up with a social experiment, in which both sides spent less time battling and more time building villages, hunting for food in the tall grass, and fishing in the little streams. The last time I’d looked in, they’d managed to construct some rudimentary huts out of the grass, only I guess that hadn’t been good enough for Stinky, who had donated Gessa’s runes for building materials.
The trolls had piled them up into what looked like a cave formation, while the ogres were constructing actual tiny houses. Or they had been. But I didn’t see anybody moving around right now.
That was strange; there was usually somebody carrying in game, punching up one of the tiny fires, or scratching his miniature ass.
And then, belatedly, I saw what Gessa had, which probably explained why she was crawling around on the floor, still cussing. A bunch of fern on a table above the box had all but exploded out of its pot, thanks to Caedmon’s overflowing magic. Which would have been fine, except that a single frond had dipped into the box, like a piece of Yggdrasil, the mythological world tree, fallen to Earth. And had changed everything.
Because while we’d been dealing with the drama of our day, the little chess pieces had been having some of their own. To us it was just a piece of fern, but to them . . . it was a ladder. A stairway to heaven, because it gave them a way out of the game.
And into a house that didn’t like competing magic and already had a serious snit on.
“Is something wrong?” Soini asked, looking from me to Gessa.
“Uh, probably not,” I said, trying not to think about the two cats lounging on the sofa, watching us uninterestedly, which weren’t really cats. They were yet more wards, created by Claire’s uncle because he’d been running an illegal still in the basement that he hadn’t wanted anybody to find. And nobody had, partially because the cats could suddenly expand to the size of prehistoric saber-toothed fluffiness and freaking end you.
“Shit,” I told Gessa, who nodded.
“Must find.”
Yeah, before the house enacted who knew what kind of revenge.
“Spread out,” I told the troops. They quickly did so, Gessa taking one side of the room and throwing pillows off couches, and Soini lighting up the other, and gingerly swishing aside drapes. I took the hall with the murderous wallpaper, in case any of the little pieces had made it this far.
And, sure enough, I spied a tiny guy all the way at the end of the hall, near the front door.
Making a run for it.
Only, weirdly enough, he appeared to be running this way. “Gessa, do we have a box or something?” I asked, wondering if the little thing had gotten into some paint somewhere, because he looked kind of red.
And then the whole room did, when a giant fist came out of nowhere and sent me flying.
Chapter Sixteen
The blow felt like a sledgehammer backed by a semi. I hit the stairs hard enough to stun me; hard enough that my nerves started blaring all kinds of warnings from virtually everywhere; hard enough that I looked up and found myself already in ultra slo-mo, the way movies are filmed when the shit has most definitely hit the fan.
It works the same way for vampires, when their brains realize they’re in over their heads. Time, of course, doesn’t actually slow down, but their perception of it does, giving them what feels like a few added seconds to evaluate a situation. It’s one reason they’re so deadly, and why they move like quicksilver in battle, their every move looking precise, calculated, and well thought out—because it usually is.