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 …
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.
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,
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.
CHAPTER FOUR
I tucked the heather sprig between the pages of Scott’s
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 …
At least, I hoped extinct. The bare limbs creaked and moaned around me, and the dry leaves chattered like gnashing teeth hungry to devour me.
The cave still freaked me out a bit. The entrance was a narrow cleft between boulders. I had to take Ralph out of my backpack so I wouldn’t crush him. He scurried into the narrow opening before me. I followed, turning sideways and pressing my back against damp stone and feeling my way with fingertips along the slimy rock—there just wasn’t room to hold a flashlight—until I found the notch that signaled the …
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to reassure myself as I aimed the flashlight around the tunnel. “They’re probably just bats.” I counted to a hundred. When I was sure nothing was coming, I turned and followed Ralph into the tunnel that led to the campus. As dirt floor gave way to tile, and stone walls to cement, I breathed easier—or as easy as I would ever breathe twenty feet underground.
When I reached the first crossing, I stopped and took out my compass and map. The map was hand-drawn by Soheila. She’d been in the tunnels before 1959, which was when a senior named Dolores Maynard had disappeared in them. Liz had them closed then, so that no students would stray into them again. She’d had all traces of them erased from campus maps and memory of them expunged from the memories of all mortal students and faculty. A wealth of campus lore had persisted about the tunnels, though. As Soheila had explained to me, no spell could entirely destroy a memory. Erasing a memory from the conscious mind simply drove it deeper into the subconscious, where it became lore, which, it turned out, was how most urban legends got their start.
Since she was not mortal, Soheila remembered the tunnels, and she had suggested we use them to move about the campus, unobserved by the nephilim. The map was sketchy and incomplete (by her own admission, Soheila and her succubi sisters had lousy senses of direction), and every time I ventured into the tunnels I worried that I would stray into one of the unmapped sections and vanish like poor Dolores Maynard.