Moonshadow (Moonshadow #1)

She cocked her head and shrugged. “It’s not my property… yet… but Kathryn’s family already tried it before, so I’m going to take a chance and say sure, go ahead. Besides, if you can break a window, I can crawl through it and get inside, and then the house will be mine anyway.”

This time she was the one to follow him as he stalked slowly across the lawn, looking at the ground. When he came to a broken piece of flagstone, he squatted, pried it up, and hefted it. The stone was big enough it would have been uncomfortably heavy for her to lift, but he carried it as if the weight was no big deal, a small but telling piece of evidence of how different they were.

Once he had selected a stone, he strode closer to the nearest window. Then he whirled like a discus thrower and hurled the stone at the window. He moved so impossibly fast she felt both a shock and a thrill just watching him. The stone shot like a bullet, and when it hit the window, the sound of the impact rocketed across the clearing.

But the window didn’t break.

Excited, she jogged over to him and took his arm. “That’s exactly what Kathryn described.”

He didn’t seem to mind that she touched him. Rubbing the back of his neck, he muttered, “But if it connected, why didn’t the window break?”

“It hit,” she said. “It just didn’t hit exactly right.”

He tilted his head. “But we can actually touch the house. The stone hit the house. We heard it.”

She rubbed her face as she tried to formulate the right words. “You know how in a fight, you might throw a punch, but you are only able to land a glancing blow? Or if you brush against something—you’re touching it lightly but not completely.”

“You’re saying we’re not fully touching the house,” he said.

“I think so.” She paused. “Or maybe this is a better explanation. I’ve only traveled down a crossover passage a few times, so I’m no expert, but I know if you come at one from the wrong direction, you don’t enter the passageway. Assuming the terrain will allow for it, you can walk right across one and never go inside. It’s part of the land magic. You’re touching the land—you’re walking on it—but you’re not in alignment with the passageway.”

“The house is inside the crossover magic, so it’s the alignment that matters.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Except the crossover passageway is broken. It’s in pieces, so there’s no smooth entryway like there is with passageways that function normally.”

“I’m going to try one more time,” he said. “Stand back.”

She skipped back a step, watching him curiously. This time he didn’t reach for anything to throw. Instead, she felt a massive surge in his Power. Suddenly light appeared in the palm of one of his hands, and he threw it. Like a bolt of lightning, the Power snapped across the space to the window and impacted it with another crack that echoed across the clearing.

A chill ran down her spine as she watched. That bolt of lightning—that had been what he had thrown at her two weeks ago.

She was a good, competent magic user. She had her bag of tricks: an affinity working with silver and with runes, a certain ability of prescience that she had honed over the years, a decent repertoire of spells, and a nice little bit of time-space-dimension woo-woo from her Djinn heritage—not a lot, just a little. She was talented enough that, so far, she had made her skills work to her advantage.

But in terms of raw strength, she had nothing to compare to this. Nikolas’s Power was world-class, and he would be able to hold his own among the heaviest hitters in any of the demesnes. What else was he capable of doing?

He turned to her and caught her staring at him. For the first time, she saw real excitement in his eyes. “I threw as much Power as I could into that morningstar, and it still didn’t break.”

Was that what the spell was called? She glanced at the intact window, then back at him. Why was he so excited? She murmured, “That’s not really a surprise at this point….”

“This building might be dangerous,” he told her. “But unless you have Djinn magic, the inside has got to be one of the most secure places on Earth. Virtually a fortress.”

“Sure,” she said, watching him uncertainly. “Probably. That’s what it looks like, anyway.”

He advanced to grab her by the shoulders. His handsome features were ablaze. “And one of those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle must connect to home. That’s where the old crossover passageway here used to lead. Right?”

She took hold of his wrists, gripping him as he gripped her. “I-I don’t know. I guess it might be possible? But the operative word here is might.”

He said, “Djinn can’t dematerialize and travel from Earth to Other lands, and back again. They can only travel within a certain dimension. They have to use crossover passageways just like everyone else. We all knew that. None of us ever considered, in all of this time, that a Djinn might still be able to use the pieces of broken land magic to make the trip from here to Lyonesse.”

She sucked in a breath. There was so much hope in his face he looked like an entirely different man from the hard, closed-down stranger she had first laid eyes on. It was painful to look at him. In the intensity of his hope, she saw the true depth of the tragedy he had endured and the heartbreak.

Gently she said, “Oh, Nikolas, this is all just a theory. We still don’t know if I’m right. Please don’t let your hopes get too high.”

In response, he hauled her close, kissed her hard, and then looked at the house again. “Too late.”

*

Sophie looked worried. It was not an expression he was used to seeing on her face. Strangely, it made him want to pause long enough to pass his hand over the heavy, curling mass of her hair.

A better man than he would remind her again of the increasing danger she faced as she grew more and more entangled with the Dark Court.

But he was not a better man. He would do anything, use anyone, and use himself hardest of all, in order to break through to home, to find that safe fortress for his men, to turn the murderous tide that had all but washed the Daoine Sidhe away into memory.

And he knew what she would say if he did try to warn her. He would get another old-timey folk lecture. She was suicidally brave, he had to give her that.

Obeying an instinct he couldn’t put into words, he pressed his lips to her forehead. “Break into that house,” he told her. “Claim it. Own it. And I will rent it from you for a fortune. I’ll get you anything you want. Money. Jewels. A villa in Capri. I’ll build you a house that is actually comfortable and safe to live in.”

She lifted one shoulder and gave him a sly, mischievous smile. “I don’t really want a villa in Capri. I just like to say that to assholes.”