Moonshadow (Moonshadow #1)

The two-natured Wyr could be extremely long-lived. Some rare breeds were among the first generation of Elder Races and considered to be immortal. They could be killed, but they would never die of old age.

“You’ve never been there yourself?” Sophie asked. She opened up the file to scan the contents.

Photographs of a massive medieval house lay inside. Part stone fortress, part monstrous architectural folly, it brooded against a backdrop of ancient, tangled forest. The land fell away behind the house, and in one corner a lake or the edge of a river glimmered. She looked through each of the photos, studying the different angles. The palms of her hands tingled as she handled the pictures.

The photos themselves weren’t magic, not exactly. But something about the house was, or the land, and the camera had managed to capture a hint of it.

Kathryn told her, “Oh, I’ve been there several times, but I’ve not been inside the house. Nobody has since the last time my father went in. It… stopped letting people in.”

Sophie rested her left palm on one of the photographs and searched for that elusive hint of magic. When she connected with it, her palm tingled again. She sensed a distant breeze blowing through the trees in the scene. The house had five gables.

A subtle, almost indefinable shift rippled under her palm. She leaned forward, her attention sharpening.

No, not five gables. There were seven.

What the hell.

Belatedly, what Kathryn had said sank in, and she looked up at the other woman. She raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, the house won’t let anybody in?”

Kathryn let out a soft laugh. “I know how that sounds. I’m anthropomorphizing a building, but I don’t know how else to say it. It’s a strange place. You would have to experience it to believe it.”

Sophie glanced down again at the photograph that lay underneath her palm. “Tell me more.”

“The Weston family seat is in the West Marches, the land that borders England and Wales. The West Marches is a witchy place and intensely magical, with more crossover passageways per acre than anywhere else in the world. Many wars have been fought all over that land. Once upon a time, or so the story goes, there had been a crossover passage on this very spot.” Kathryn reached over to tap one of the photographs.

“You mean there isn’t one there now?”

As Sophie asked the question, her mind started working on the concept. What could destroy a crossover passageway? Crossover passageways had been around since the Earth was formed, when time and space had buckled. They led to Other lands, where modern technology didn’t work, time flowed differently than it did on Earth, and the sun shone with a different light.

Sophie chewed on her lip as she thought.

Sometimes explosives were used to close small passageways if they were unstable and only led to tiny pockets of land, like caves. To destroy a major crossover passageway, a natural disaster like an earthquake could be powerful enough. Land crumbling, tectonic plates shifting, that sort of thing.

Or magic.

Lots and lots of magic. An almost inconceivable amount of very destructive magic. A shiver rippled through her at the thought.

“No, there isn’t a passageway now, at least not a functioning one,” Kathryn replied. “War happened. There was a battle on that spot, and the crossover passage shattered. Some bright ancestor of mine decided it would be a good idea to build a house there in order to seal his conquest of the land, but the land still had all that broken crossover magic. It still does, in fact. Family legend says from the very beginning when the first timbers were raised, the house was always strange, and it got stranger as time went on.”

“You have an ancestor who built on a broken crossover passageway?” Sophie snorted.

“Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?” Kathryn gave her a speaking look.

Sophie grinned. “I can just imagine how odd the house must be.”

“The stories get pretty entertaining. Entire wings disappeared and reappeared, and the scenery outside the windows changed. People got lost inside, and they couldn’t find their way out again. One pair of children disappeared for weeks before they reappeared again, dirty and starved, and babbling of strange adventures.”

She leaned forward. “Do you have written records of what they saw?”

Kathryn shook her head. “There are hardly any written records other than land ownership, just legends passed down by word of mouth. After a couple of generations, the family couldn’t cope with the strangeness any longer. They built another house and moved and left this place abandoned. Every few years, someone would go to check on the property to see if it was still standing. My father said the last time he went, he could turn the key in the lock, but he couldn’t get the door to open. The last time I checked the property, I couldn’t even get the key in the lock.”

Sophie looked down at the photograph she still touched, drawn there by the frisson she felt underneath her palm. Gabled and oddly shadowed, the house looked like something out of Dark Shadows, a cult show that ran on classic TV networks and had both delighted and terrified her as a child. “Did anybody try to break a window?”

“My father said he tried, but the window wouldn’t break.” Kathryn smiled. “The place is like a Rubik’s cube. The pieces are all there—I think—but none of the colors line up. We took to calling it the family albatross. It’s been hanging around our necks all this time.”

Sophie raised her eyebrow again. “Did you hire experts to try to get in?”

“Of course, but no one managed it. I don’t think anyone has walked through those halls since before the sixteenth century and only then intermittently, as the house had been abandoned some time before. The gods only know what might have been left inside. There aren’t any written records of that either.”

“How mysterious,” Sophie murmured.

Kathryn turned brisk. “Now we come to the crux of the matter. The terms of my father’s will state that I am to seek out the children he rescued, one by one, and extend an offer. Each person may have ninety days to find a way to get inside the house. If anyone does figure out a way in, they may take ownership of the house, any contents that may still be in it, and the grounds, which includes five acres, a small lake, and a small, four-room house that used to be the gatekeeper’s cottage. They also receive a trust that is entailed to the property. Both the property and the entailment can be passed on to their beneficiaries.”

Sophie blinked. And blinked again.

Grounds. House. Two houses.

Kathryn really was offering her an inheritance.