Chapter 23

  I woke very late the next morning, the old-fashioned alarm clock on my bedside table telling me it was a few minutes past eleven, to the sound of the shower in my bathroom running. I rolled over and discovered first that someone had draped a light blanket over me at some point and I'd managed to get myself wrapped up in it, and second that D.T.'s tactical vest and belt were sitting on the window seat. Her new war hammer - definitely not my best work, I winced a little to see it in the light of day - was propped up beside them, its distinctly uneven head resting on the floor.

  I resolved to make her a better one, assuming she was serious about keeping it.

  "I took the liberty," Ken's voice said from behind me as the door opened, "of laundering D.T.'s uniform and providing her with sweatpants and a sweatshirt as well as suitable toiletries."

  I rolled over again to see him pushing a heavily laden breakfast cart into the room. "She categorically refused to leave until she was certain you were all right," he continued blithely, pushing the cart to the foot of the bed and stopping. "She even insisted on sleeping on the window seat. I think not being able to wake you up while driving you home, and then how readily you submitted to her tucking you into bed made her uneasy. It was quite charming."

  He winked at me, unfolded a bundle from the bottom of the cart and carried it to the bathroom door. He knocked, then called, "Caley is now awake, your uniform is hanging on the outside of the bathroom door, and a selection of breakfast foods awaits." Setting action to words, he hung the bundle - which I now recognized as D.T.'s uniform pants and shirt - on the door.

  I heard D.T.'s voice, muffled by the shower and door, call back, "Thank you, Ken!"

  "Yes," I said drowsily, "thank you." I sat up and yawned.

  Ken, ever thoughtful, promptly offered me a mug of tea. I struggled to extricate my arms, managed to do so while keeping the blanket draped around my shoulders, and took the mug from him. I cradled it in both hands, soaking up its warmth and sipping from it.

  It had a flowery flavor with a faintly bitter aftertaste, incompletely covered up by a bit of sugar. I frowned a little. "I don't recognize the flavor."

  "It's an herbal mixture that one of your great-grandmothers developed," Ken said. "It's supposed to be very good for restoring energy when you're exhausted. Your grandmother in particular swore by it."

  I took another sip, feeling the warmth of it suffusing me and making me feel less hollow. "Oh. Okay."

  By the time D.T. emerged from the bathroom about twenty minutes later, barefoot and wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt with the logo of the Metropolitan Police on it above the words "Peel House," I was sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed, still wrapped in my blanket, but picking at a bowl of fruit chunks and feeling considerably less drowsy.

  "I," she proclaimed, "could absolutely get used to this. Though where Ken got a Hendon College sweatshirt I have no idea." She dragged over my little desk chair and sat down on the other side of the breakfast cart, peering at me closely. "Well, you don't look quite so faded this morning. You were almost gray last night."

  "The Hall," I said, popping another piece of fruit in my mouth.

  "Huh?" She collected a plate from the lower shelf and started piling food on it. Pancakes, a couple of sausages, some slices of fried tomato.

  "The Hall probably provided the sweatshirt," I said after I swallowed. "It has a way of doing that, if it likes you."

  She met my eyes and raised an eyebrow.

  I shrugged. "You brought me home, helped me get to bed, didn't try to share my bed uninvited, and - the way Ken tells it - kept watch over me while I slept." I gave her a warm smile. "By the Hall's estimation, that qualifies you as 'liked.' At least, based on the sweatshirt. If it didn't like you, the sweatshirt would either have been blank, or worse, Ken would've been scrounging ill-fitting clothes for you. At which point he probably would've gently suggested you depart."

  "I'd much rather be liked than given the boot, however politely. And you sound more like your usual self this morning," D.T. said with an approving nod. She spotted Penny sniffing the air - still appearing to be asleep otherwise - and waved a sausage in her general direction. It was snapped - carefully - from D.T.'s fingers and devoured, making D.T. laugh and giving lie to Penny's apparent indolence.

  Sparkle swirled down from her nightlight and attacked a plate of cookies sitting off to one side, devouring them like a starving piranha.

  "All is right with the world," I proclaimed grandly, and took a piece of toast, spread a bit of apple butter on it, and munched contentedly. "Did you enjoy watching my fairies?" I asked after I swallowed a bite.

  D.T. poured herself a glass of orange juice from an insulated jug, and whistled softly. "That was honestly one of the most amazing, beautiful sights I've ever seen."

  I smiled. "It really is, isn't it? You should see the village." I closed my eyes, stretched and yawned. I felt stiff.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was startled to find D.T. holding a plate out to me. It had two hard boiled eggs on it, along with a couple of sausage links and slices of tomato. "You're not going to feel better if you just pick at fruit and toast," she said firmly. "You need iron and protein."

  I smiled wryly and took the plate. "Yes, mother."

  She chuckled. "Eat your breakfast and take a shower. You still reek of that nasty, greasy smoke."

  I gave myself a sniff and grimaced. "So I do."

  We ate in silence for a few minutes, before D.T. quietly said, "Can…can we talk about last night?"

  I swallowed my last bite of egg and looked at her. She was staring down at empty plate, which was trembling slightly in her hand.

  "What about it?" I asked.

  She looked up and met my eyes, and I thought there was disquiet and fear in hers. From the moment I'd met her, she'd always seemed so strong and self-controlled, not to mention eager to get in on the weirdness that my life had become. I supposed that a crack appearing in her armor had been inevitable.

  "You're just…okay with fighting weird rat creatures and talking to an ancient spirit inhabiting a bunch of scarecrows? That…doesn't freak you out a little?" She asked, sounding more than a little plaintive.

  Not just a crack in her armor, then…she was trying to cope with an experience so profoundly weird and unnatural that it had kicked off a fear reaction in her, which none of the other weirdness she'd seen since coming into my life had done. I definitely understood what she was feeling.

  I put my empty plate down and leaned back, propping myself up on my hands and frowning a little. "Actually, it doesn't," I said softly. "But I've spent most of the last year absorbing and adjusting to a profound level of weirdness, a lot of it fairly terrifying at first glance."

  "How do you deal with it?" She asked. "You're not even shaking. How can you encompass this and not freak out? I spent last night smashing monsters with a hammer."

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  I smiled a little. "There's no magic to it," I said gently. "It just took time. You’d have to ask Ken to be sure, but I think I had at least two full-blown panic attacks in my first few weeks living in Oakwood Hall. Probably three."

  "Four," Sparkle interjected absently around a cookie.

  "However," I continued, "I think I can offer you two short-term salves while you try to embrace the crazy."

  "Please."

  "First," I said, "consider the good we did last night. Not only did we protect George Roberts and his family from monsters, we were intermediaries for him in a deal with the spirit of his family land, which will ensure better health for his flock and better crops from his fields."

  I let her digest that for a minute before adding, "Second, let me take a shower and get into fresh clothes, and I'll show you some of the wonder that I find more than offsets the scary."

  When I emerged from the bathroom, feeling much refreshed after a hot shower and dressed in a pair of brown leggings and a pine-green short-sleeved tunic, I found D.T. - back in her uniform - and Ken standing together by the windows. Ken was holding a large, open tome that I thought I recognized from the workshop, and was flipping through the pages.

  He looked over as I approached and smiled. "You look much better now," he said warmly. "D.T. has been telling me all about your encounter last night, and I wanted to have a look through the family bestiary to see if I could identify what it was you faced."

  "Any luck?" I asked hopefully. Then, in an aside to D.T., added, "I find it helps quash some of the fear to put a name to what I'm dealing with." Which was an exaggeration, having only actually faced a small number of human wizards, one unwilling dusk fox, and one particularly odious ogre that I'd let get away. But if it made her feel better…

  "That makes sense," she agreed.

  Ken sighed. "No luck yet. They sound like a variety of things I'm loosely familiar with, mostly magical constructs, but none of those would've made dens. Or had…offspring."

  "We didn't actually see any juveniles," I pointed out.

  "Just heard them die," D.T. said softly and shuddered.

  I reached out and rubbed her arm gently. "Pest control."

  She looked at me, frowning and taking my hand in hers. "What?"

  "What we did was pest control," I said. "The pests in question were just…a bit bigger, nastier, and more aggressive than you're used to."

  "You're taking this awfully well," she said dryly, "considering we were killing living things."

  I shuddered a little. "Couldn't you feel how…how wrong they were? They weren't natural creatures, they didn't belong in this world. Even that spirit of the land was rejecting their presence."

  "Even still," D.T. said, sounding doubtful.

  Ken, I noticed, was frowning at me a little. He didn't say anything, though, for which I was grateful. It occurred to me that I was so focused on helping D.T. deal with being freaked out by what she'd experienced, that I wasn't letting myself crack under what was, really, my first major encounter with…pretty much anything, really, von Einhardt aside. I wasn't counting the two young punks from the ICOA, since they'd mostly been dealt with by my fairy friends.

  "Maybe you're right. I'll probably have my freak-out later," I said diplomatically.

  "Actually," Ken said, "I'm not sure you will. You seem to be handling this very well. Though I think, with your permission of course, I'll have a little rummage around in your head before tonight's lesson. Just to make sure."

  I'd explained some of how Ken was teaching me to D.T., who just raised an eyebrow and said, "You know how crazy that sounds, right?"

  "Profoundly," Ken agreed with a little smile. "Now, unless I'm mistaken, Caley intends to check in on her new dusk fox guest, and introduce you to some of the friendlier denizens of her world."

  I nodded, stepping barefoot up onto the window seat. "That was precisely my intention. Sparkle, Penny, coming?"

  Sparkle seemed to materialize on my shoulder, and Penny hopped off the end of the bed and trotted over.

  "Oh," I said, hand on the window handle. "We haven't refilled the feeders in a couple of days. Sparkle, could you -"

  Ken had set his book aside and gone to the breakfast cart, where he now pulled three bottles of cola from the bottom shelf. "I came prepared for this eventuality."

  I smiled at him. "Ken, what would I do without you?"

  "Perish the thought," he said dryly. "Perhaps D.T. would like to do the honors this time."

  "Excellent idea," I agreed. "D.T., Sparkle, do me a favor and grab those soda bottles."

  "Okay…" D.T. said uncertainly, taking two of the bottles while Sparkle zipped over and levitated the third.

  "Come on!" I said, opened the window, and stepped out into the soft grass of the field beyond. As I always did when barefoot, I took a moment to wriggle my toes in the grass. I'd never felt anything like it anywhere else. It was as soft as a plush carpet.

  Penny hopped out beside me, glanced up and then nodded toward the edge of the field, letting me know that - as was her habit - she was going to make a circuit of the perimeter before rejoining me. I nodded in return, and she trotted off. Halfway to the edge of the field, she was joined by a dozen fairies who swirled around her and fell into formation with her.

  That made me smile. It was charming how seriously the fairy guard took their jobs.

  D.T. emerged from the window, her eyes wide as she took in the empty part of the field. "This is beautiful," she said softly. "I mean…I knew it was beautiful last night and this morning, but…this is like the most perfect summer day that ever was."

  Sparkle giggled and landed on her shoulder, the third bottle of soda floating beside them. "Turn around," she said.

  D.T. did, and her jaw dropped.

  I mean, it's a perfectly natural reaction to seeing a cluster of windows and their frame hanging in mid-air with nothing to support them, leading back into the room she'd just emerged from, and where Ken now waited in the opening, grinning.

  Then she took a few steps to the side, her eyes wide and her mouth still hanging open. "Oh my god," she breathed after a moment, taking in the fairy village.

  I stepped up beside her. "I know, right? Now you know why I kept telling you it was impossible to describe."

  "No description could ever do this justice," she agreed in a quiet, awed voice.

  Spice and Shine appeared hovering in front of us. We were, after all, awfully close to their home now.

  "Are those for us?" Spice asked eagerly, looking at the soda bottles.

  I smiled at them. "I'm sorry we're so late refilling them this morning. We had a long night. Spice, Shine, allow me to introduce Sergeant Dejah Thoris Burroughs of the Avon and Somerset Police Force."

  "The local constabulary in Oakwood," Spice said with a nod. As they hovered in front of D.T., Spice - in her shorts and cropped top outfit - bowed, while Shine - in her little dress - curtseyed in mid-air. "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Sergeant. Caley has spoken of you at some length."

  D.T. was obviously charmed. "Caley has spoken of you as well. It's very nice to meet you both finally. Please, call me D.T."

  "Sparkle, Spice, Shine, why don't you show D.T. how to refill the soda feeders," I said with a smile. "I'm going to go check on our patient."

  The three fairies swirled around D.T., and Sparkle went so far as to latch onto one of D.T.'s lapels and start towing her towards the feeders. As I turned away, she was laughing and saying, "Woah, slow down! Is this actually okay for you to have? I mean, we invented it, and it's not particularly good for us!"

  It made me feel good to hear her laughter after her earlier disquiet.

  I made my way to the edge of the village, where the clan of gnomes had set up their homes…and as promised, a temporary shelter had been set up for the injured dusk fox. It was basically a lean-to, built of branches and a covering that appeared to be woven moss, leaves, and lichen. Its open side faced into the village instead of out into the woods, and as I approached, I saw that Basil and a few of his fellow gnomes were clustered around the dusk fox, tending to his wounds. The dusk fox himself appeared to be deeply asleep, breathing slowly and steadily.

  I sank to my knees in the grass close by and waited for them to finish. It was only a minute or two before Basil turned to me. "Good morning, Lady Reid." The elderly gnome folded his hands over his stomach and smiled warmly up at me. "How can we be of service?"

  "I wanted to see how your patient is doing," I said softly, not wanting to wake the slumbering dusk fox.

  "Very well," Basil said heartily. "He'll sleep a day or more yet, I think, courtesy of our salves. But his injuries are healing nicely. He'll make a full recovery."

  "That's wonderful, Basil," I said, and almost jumped as Penny slipped up beside me and settled against my side.

  "Thank you for taking care of my brother, Basil," she said softly. "If there's anything I can do to repay your kindness…"

  Basil waved off the offer with a gentle gesture. "There is no debt incurred here, Miss Penumbra. We act in service of Lady Reid, and do so happily."

  Penny nodded seriously. "Even still."

  Basil chuckled softly. "Your offer is graciously appreciated, and I won't forget it." He drummed his fingers on his belt and smiled up at us. "Can I do anything else for you this morning?"

  I smiled and shook my head. "Not right now, Basil, thank you very much. Please send us a messenger when he wakes up. Spice and Shine -"

  "Know how to find you," he interrupted gently, smiling. "We all know, Lady Reid. I will do so." He bowed politely.

  Penny and I both bowed in return to him, then rose and headed back toward the center of the clearing.

  Where we found D.T. standing motionless near the soda feeders, her arms stretched out to either side, absolutely covered in happily chattering fairies. They were even sitting atop her head. She was smiling so widely, and her eyes sparkled with such joy, that I thought she might burst from it.

  Sparkle, Spice, and Shine fluttered over to land on my shoulders, giggling. "She's been like that since she put the bottles in," Sparkle said. "Should we break it up?"

  I considered D.T.'s beaming face, a smile growing on my own lips. This, I thought, was what she'd looked like as a little girl when she was happy. I wondered when the last time she'd been this happy was. I wondered if I'd ever been that happy myself.

  "Nah," I said finally. "Give her a few more minutes. We can spare the time for this."

  The Oakwood Hall Bestiary (finally...life had been bludgeoning me lately). Caley will be writing about fairies in this entry.