“April is . . . a special case. She’s adopted. Sort of.” Seeing my blank expression, he shrugged, and said, “She’s a Dryad.”
This time, there was no “nearly”; I literally choked on my coffee, coughing for several minutes before I managed to croak out a startled, “What?”
“She’s a Dryad.”
“How does that even work?” Most Dryads are sweet, reclusive bimbos who avoid people whenever possible, preferring the company of woodland fauna and other Dryads. They’re not the sharpest crayons in the box. Most of them probably don’t even realize the box exists.
“It’s a long story, and it happened before I got here, so it’s sort of secondhand . . .” Alex looked at my expression and continued without missing a beat, “But I guess I can try. April was an oak Dryad. She lived in a proper Grove and everything, with about a dozen others. Then some developers bulldozed the place—including her tree—to put up condos.”
“That’s horrible.”
“The Dryads thought so, too. Most of them sealed themselves away and waited to die, but not April.” Alex shook his head. “She grabbed the biggest branch she could carry and ran like hell.”
“So what happened?”
“She got lucky. She found Jan.” Alex picked up his own coffee, turning the cup in his hands. “Jan loaded her into the car and drove home. From what I understand, she paged Elliot while she was en route—they’ve been friends forever—and sent him to look for survivors. All he found was kindling. He cursed the land and came back to see what was going on.”
“And?”
“Jan was up with her all night. No one knows exactly what she did, but April lives in an information ‘tree’ inside one of the Sun servers now, and she’s doing fine.”
I paused. “You’re telling me you have a Dryad living in your computers.”
“She’s happy there. She doesn’t get sluggish in winter like most Dryads do, she doesn’t need clean water or fresh air, she’s pretty much indestructible—she’s happy.”
Jan moved a Dryad from her home tree into an inanimate object all by herself? I shook my head. “How does that work?”
“I’m not sure. You’d have to ask Jan.”
These people kept managing to get weirder. “What does April do in there?”
“She acts as the interoffice paging system.”
This time, I wasn’t trying to swallow anything. I gaped at him. “What?”
“Have you ever been on one side of a building and needed to talk to someone on the other side?”
“Yes.” That was why Shadowed Hills had a small army of pages on continuous duty.
“That’s what April does. She finds you, relays the message, and goes back to whatever she was doing before you called. She doesn’t seem to mind, and Jan doesn’t stop us, so we use her to make sure people are where they need to be.”
“You’re using the Dryad who lives in your computers as an intercom.”
“Basically, yes.”
“You’re all nuts.”
“Yes, and we’re cute, too.” Alex winked. My cheeks burned red. Now clearly amused, he walked over to sit down beside me on the bed. “I believe that makes it my question.”
“I believe you’re right.”
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”
“Ask the insulting questions, why don’t you?” I took a large gulp of coffee, ignoring the way it burned my throat, and shook my head. “It’s complicated. There just hasn’t been time.”
“So that means you’re available?”
I gave him a sidelong look. “I think that’s two questions.”
“Maybe.” Alex grinned. “Is that a complaint?”
“Three questions.” I could feel the heat coming off his skin. He hadn’t dropped his human disguise, and this close, I could smell the clover and coffee of his magic beneath the brisk cleanness of his shampoo. “No, I’m not seeing anyone, and yes, I might be available. After I’m off duty.”
“Good.” Leaning over, he plucked the coffee cup from my hand, set it on the floor, and kissed me.
Privacy and familiarity make a big difference where I’m concerned. I pressed myself against his chest, returning the kiss without hesitation. The state of my hair and clothing was forgotten in favor of the much more interesting question of how close we could pull each other without one of us actually winding up in the other’s lap. He’d been talking with his hands since the moment we met, and now, tangled in my hair and cupping the back of my neck, they sang.
Alex was the one who pulled away first, leaving me out of breath and wide-eyed. “After you’re off duty?”
Not quite trusting myself to talk, I nodded.
“Good.” He brushed his lips across my forehead as he stood, walked back to the desk and picked up his own discarded breakfast. “I’ll see you at the office?”
That was an easier question. I swallowed, and answered, “Yeah.”
“Great.” Grinning, he opened the door, and he was gone.
I stared after him for a long, stunned moment before I groaned, flopping backward on the bed. The smell of coffee and clover still lingered in the air, and I had the not entirely unwelcome feeling that things had just gotten a lot more complicated.
EIGHT
ALEX LEFT SHORTLY AFTER TWELVE, but it was half-past two by the time I managed to get Quentin moving. More things you only learn when you spend a lot of time with someone: Quentin was even less fond of getting up early than I am. I’m normally the one being hauled out of bed, not the one doing the hauling. I was in too good of a mood after my unexpected breakfast date to get grumpy about it; I just got myself ready to go, ordered more coffee from room service, and let him take his time.
It was already a warm day outside, but I wore Tybalt’s jacket anyway, combining it with my T-shirt and jeans in a way that Tybalt would probably have found positively slovenly. The faint scent of pennyroyal still clung to the leather. It was comforting, somehow, even if I didn’t want to examine that thought too closely.
On the plus side, our late departure meant we missed most of the traffic. Spending rush hour in a car with a half-awake teenager isn’t an experience I’m in any hurry to have. We reached ALH a little after three o’clock, sailing free and easy all the way.
The gate cranked upward as we approached. “That’s more like it.”
Quentin yawned, damp dandelion-fluff hair still plastered against his head. “You even scare the landscape.”
“It probably remembers us from yesterday and doesn’t want to be enchanted again. The inanimate can have a surprisingly long memory.” It really was a beautiful day. I was almost humming as we pulled down the slope to the parking lot and into the first available space.
A little girl appeared on the sidewalk ahead of us. There was no transition or warning; one second the sidewalk was empty, and the next second she was there, hands shoved into the pockets of her jeans, watching us with the clinical interest of a cat watching a bird through a closed screen door.
“That’s . . . different.”
“Toby? Do you see that?”
“You mean the little blonde girl on the sidewalk?”
“Yeah.”
“Then, yes, I do.” I unfastened my seat belt, climbing out of the car. “Let’s go say hello.” Quentin followed close behind as I started across the lot.
The girl wasn’t as young as I’d assumed; she was probably closer to thirteen than ten, although Quentin still looked a few years older. There was a strange blankness to her features that created the illusion of her being a much younger child—a certain lack of information, of the experience you’d expect from a girl in her early teens. She was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a gray T-shirt, and her only visible adornments were the rabbit-shaped barrettes that kept her shoulder-length blonde hair from falling into her face.
Everything about her was yellow, from the faint golden tan of her skin to her wide yellow eyes, shadowed by the green frames of her glasses. Her irises matched her hair with eerie exactness. She had the Torquill bone structure; whatever she’d started out as, she was definitely her mother’s daughter now.