Her bottom lip did a real, honest quiver. She bit it and blinked, then ran through the arch into my arms. “I thought the cottage sent you home.” Her eyes rounded and her lip did that ever-so-tiny wiggle again. “Or that I’d moved and left you in the snow or… or…”
I was too cold to give comfort. I hugged her close anyway. “I’m sorry.” She curled against my chest. “I didn’t realize.”
She sniffled. “I thought I’d lost you. I thought my magic rejected you. I don’t want to move again. I…” She trembled.
Was she cold or scared? She was definitely cold. And scared.
“I’m sorry.” I had no idea what else to say. “The cottage changed during the night and distracted me. I didn’t think. I’m so sorry.” I did my best to keep my bare skin off hers. She wore her nightgown, and thick handmade socks and handwarmers, but my forearms and half my biceps were bare beyond my t-shirt sleeves.
My need for her was tertiary to all this. It had to be. I had to get a handle on the situation, on the fae promises and the Ellie touches and the fact that I had no idea how to parse what the cottage wanted or needed. And that I obviously didn’t know what Ellie wanted or needed, either.
“Always wake me, or leave a note,” she said.
That might not always work, I thought. It might not. But this particular not wasn’t the point at the moment, even if such pedantic structures often were the point of fae magic.
Again, all-in, or drowning under wave after wave of that all-in.
So I made my choice. I kissed the top of Ellie’s head and stroked her back even though I was much too cold. If the fae magic of her cottage was going to mess with me, it was going to mess with me. Like life, magic always found a way. “I will always let you know where I am,” I said. At least I had Ellie.
She looked up at my face. “Promise me.”
“I promise.” I’d just stepped off a cliff. Or into crashing waves. Or into the best thing that has ever happened to me.
Probably all three.
She glanced around my arm. “So that’s why the magic knocked us out right away last night.” She didn’t move away even though I could tell the chill wafting off my chest was beginning to make her tense up. “It does that when it makes changes. I was expecting the bed to upgrade. It’s winter. That’s why the mattress moved to the fire a couple of nights ago.” She pointed over her shoulder. “The cottage made the doggy door for Marcus Aurelius the first night he stayed. It picked up on Chihiro’s love of flowers, so there are always roses or cherry blossoms or tulips now, but this…” She waved at the new inside garden. “I think it…” She snapped her mouth shut.
Her lovely blue eyes rounded into big circles and her shoulders tightened. Had she just realized we were all-in here? But I was pretty sure the intelligent woman rapidly blinking at how her cottage had doubled its kitchen footprint knew exactly what was happening.
“What?” Though I might have somehow damaged her magic. An addition took significant spellwork and energy. I frowned.
She placed her hand on my chest. She slowly inhaled but the tension in her shoulders didn’t leave. “You said last night that you remember everything.”
“I do.” All of it, from the muffin at Lara’s to the pike through my chest to all the times she kissed me even though I’d slept with Benta.
Benta. Damn it, I thought.
The guilty fear rose up in my chest again. The same What did I do this time? response that manifested whenever I messed up. My awareness of that guilty fear coiled around the fear itself, and then another coil added itself—my annoyance that I was once again dealing with the entire rich ecosystem of my unwanted, feared, rage-filled, pained life.
I should have been well beyond this. I was beyond it. The elves taught me how to deal with my emotions in a healthy way. I taught myself. I knew what to do.
Breathe. Be calm. Look for a solution. Or be elven and never speak of the past.
None of which were going to work this time.
She stared around my arm at the golden glow and the sweet plinking of the pond. “You told me how you feel. When we were stuck in Vampland. You were on that stupid pike and I think you thought you were going to die so you flat-out told me.”
I’d told her I fall in love easily. I feel easily. My father gave me a hitching body, but my emotions? They flowed smoothly to the surface.
“Do you remember when you helped me with the photo Chihiro took? The one of when the cottage moved here?”
I nodded. “I didn’t see death.” I saw the World Tree.
“I’m a witch, Frank.” She looked up at me. “My mother is fae. My father was a mundane man. A talented man who charmed my mother with his music and art, but a mundane nonetheless.” She waved her hand in front of herself. “I should be burning up with witch magic.”
The mundane part of a witch resisted the magic, and like all resistors, that resistance causes problems—heat, disconnection, sometimes insanity. But not always. Some witches can channel the sparks. Most couldn’t. Rose burned up from her witch magic. It ate her body and soul and she ended her life in a fire so hot Alfheim’s magic couldn’t stop it.
The spellwork of the cottage probably drained the magic away at night, when it closed up. It seemed the most likely—and the best way—to harness her power. It was also the likely reason neither Ellie nor the cottage brimmed with visible magic while it was open. All the work was done at night, while she fed the battery.
She stared at the pallet and the big, fluffy cushion. “I fuel this place,” she
