home and pretended to be Gabriel. He’d manipulated my grief for his own purpose. He’d better have a damned good reason or I’d blast him back to Faerie, despite the fact that he’d helped save my life there. “How did you get here, and why?”
“Which question would you like me to answer first?” Puck asked.
“Don’t you dare toy with me, or I’ll blow you into a million pieces.”
“Temper, temper,” Puck said, rising from the bed and approaching me. “That attitude of yours will get you into trouble.”
“It already does,” I said shortly. “Now tell me why you’re here and how you got into the house without waking Jude and Beezle, or so help me I’ll—”
“You have my jewel,” Puck said, nodding at the blue sapphire he’d given us for safe passage. “I can come and go wherever it is.”
I grabbed it off my dresser and held it out to him. “Take it back, then. I don’t want to wake up to find you impersonating my husband again. Is that how you got the queen pregnant? By pretending to be Oberon?”
Puck nodded. “It helped them maintain the fiction they needed—that Titania had been loyal to him, and that he had sired a child.”
“Does she know that it was you, and not him?”
He shrugged. “It is not what she knows, but what she will admit to herself.”
“Why can’t you just answer a question in a straightforward manner?”
“Now, what is the fun in that?”
He still hadn’t taken the jewel from me. I waved it in front of him. “Take it back.”
“I’d rather not,” Puck said. “I might want to visit with you again.”
“If you don’t take it with you, I’ll throw it in the garbage can, and next time you come through you’ll find yourself caressing rats at the city dump.”
“I think you’ll find that if you throw it away, it will return to you,” he said with a small smile.
I dropped my hand at my side. “What do you want from me?”
Puck wandered around the room, picking up things here and there—the book on my bedside table that I never had time to read, some little silver knickknacks that had belonged to my mother, the plastic hairbrush that Gabriel had used to comb my hair on our wedding night. “I may want to ask a favor of you sometime in the future.”
“Really,” I said flatly.
He looked up at me, a gleam in his eyes. “Is a favor so much to ask, after I aided you in court?”
“It is a lot to ask if I don’t know what the favor is,” I said. “And I was under the impression that you helped me out for reasons of your own.”
“What would you say if I told you those reasons included wanting you indebted to me?” Puck said.
I closed my eyes. “I’d say that I should have known better than to expect a faerie to help me out of the goodness of his heart.”
“Yes, you should have,” he said.
“Just who are you, anyway?” I asked. “You seem to have a lot of power in that court.”
The air shimmered for a moment, and Puck disappeared and reappeared on the other side of the room.
“I am the voice that dances on the wind,” he said.
“Very poetic.”
He turned in a circle and threw out a shower of gold sparks. When he stopped he looked like Oberon had before I’d diminished him.
“I am the beating heart of the earth,” he said.
He held out his hand and there was a puff of blue smoke that covered him before he reappeared as himself. He seemed more serious as he approached me; the merry light that always danced in his eyes was gone.
“I am older than this earth, older than the stars. I saw Titania and Oberon born. I have walked all the ways of the universe, the hidden paths known only to a few.”
He stopped in front of me, and put his hands on my shoulders. “And I have counted Lucifer as my enemy since time untold.”
“You are not a faerie,” I said, my heart trembling.
He shook his head. “No. I am not. And I find you, Madeline Black, very interesting.”
For just a moment, I thought I saw the shadow of wings behind him. Then he winked, and disappeared.
I sank onto the bed and stared at the jewel in my hand, the jewel that had purchased my safe passage and that now bound me to some ancient creature that despised Lucifer.
It glittered in the light of the ball of nightfire that floated aimlessly in the room. The glittering reminded me too much of Puck’s eyes, and I stuffed the jewel in the drawer of my bedside table.
I glanced at the clock. It was a few minutes past five in the evening. The darkness outside made it seem much later. I went out into the hall and down to the living room.
Samiel, Jude and Beezle looked like a guy cliche, all three of them ensconced on the couch. Samiel and Jude had their shoes off and their feet propped on my coffee table. Beezle sat in between them. On either side of my gargoyle was a plastic bowl filled with junk food. One bowl had popcorn, and the other had potato chips.
Beezle looked like he’d found heaven. I heard the sounds of gunfire coming from the TV.
“Aliens?” I asked.
“I love this movie,” Beezle said.
“Shh,” Jude said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Samiel had looked up when I entered the room, and with his usual perception he realized something was going on.
What’s wrong?
“I hate to interrupt your party, but Puck’s just been to see me and I thought you’d want to know that there’s a hole in our security.”
“What?” Jude asked.
Beezle paused the movie with the remote. “Puck was here?”
I told them that Puck had appeared in my room because of the jewel. I didn’t mention that he’d appeared in the form of my dead husband and that he’d groped me.
I realized I was trembling all over. Puck had violated me. He had burrowed into my memory of Gabriel, had stolen the intimacy that we’d shared, an intimacy I’d never shared with anyone else.
Samiel was at my side in an instant, his arm around me. What did he do to you?
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell them. “Nothing,” I said through chattering teeth. “I’m just c-c-cold. Can you get me a blanket?”
Samiel looked like he wanted to push it, but decided not to. He led me toward a chair and covered me with a crocheted afghan.
I’ll get some tea, he said.
“We need to get rid of that jewel,” Jude said.
“I already tried that,” I said, still shaking. “I was told that it wouldn’t have much effect.”
“So we just have to accept that he can come and go as he pleases in this house?” Jude said angrily.
There was a knock at the back door, and I heard Samiel letting Nathaniel in the kitchen. Nathaniel entered the room, followed by Samiel carrying my tea.
“All you all right?” Nathaniel asked. He looked harried. “I felt the presence of something unnatural here, but I couldn’t get upstairs to you.”
“You felt Puck?” I asked, interested.
“You know, it’s funny,” Beezle said, shoving potato chips in his mouth. “We decided to watch the movie maybe fifteen minutes before you came out. We all had the same impulse simultaneously.”
And we didn’t even argue about what movie to watch, Samiel added.
“So Puck managed to neutralize all of you so that you couldn’t help me if I needed it,” I said. “You three didn’t seem to be aware of him at all. Nathaniel knew he was here but wasn’t able to help. How did he keep you downstairs?”
