I opened my eyes and took a deep, whopping breath. The kind you want after you’ve been stuck inside a gas station bathroom way too long. “We’re back.”
Vayl stirred. Which was when I realized how Cirilai had found him so easily. He’d come into his room, into his bed, and wrapped himself around me so tightly I felt like I’d crawled into a kid’s sleeping bag. “Um, Vayl?”
“Mmm.”
“We should get up.”
“Why?”
I strained my head to see past his curls to the little round alarm clock on the pretty railed table beside the bed. “I’m assuming you had Cole take your place when you came in here.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have to go relieve him. And you’re going to be dead to the world [literally!] in less than half an hour.”
He lifted his chin from where it rested on my shoulder. His warm breath tickled at my cheek as he said, “Then surely another twenty or thirty minutes will not hurt him.”
“You’re damn straight it will!” Cole cut in, which was when I realized Vayl, at least, hadn’t taken off his transmitter. “Get your ass up here, Jaz.” Ooh, our third sounded pretty irritable.
“Tell him I’m coming,” I said.
“I heard,” said Cole. “What are you, sitting on Vayl’s lap or something? Never mind, I don’t want to know. Just get up here. Strange things are happening and I’m tired of trying to figure out if they’re designed to pull me off Floraidh watch or if I really should investigate.”
I shoved at Vayl’s chest. It worked about as well as poking an elephant with a daisy. “We’ll be right there,” I said anyway.
Vayl began to nuzzle that sensitive area right behind my earlobe. Which made my eyes roll right up in their sockets. Tough not to make any noise as his hand slipped under my shirt. I wanted it to continue . . . well, was forever too long? But Cole needed us. The mission loomed. Not to mention my crappy mother. And did I really want to lock in the memories of our first time with a Scidairan’s spell-drenched B and B?
Not to mention my nap breath. Not as bad as morning breath, but still skanky enough to warrant a brushing. Because underneath it the aftertaste of Brude’s blood had lingered. Impossible, my mind whispered. Your body was here the whole time.
Tell that to my taste buds.
Unbelievable the effort it took to peel my hands off Vayl’s ass. Apparently they’d discovered it fit them better than a pair of driving gloves and they didn’t appreciate the order to move. Because they kept trying to pull the old cup-and-squeeze, I shoved them under my thighs where they proceeded to pinch me for depriving them of such pleasure after a long, long absence. “I have to pee,” I said.
The nibbling at my ear stopped. Frustrated scream from my bimbo libido, who’d been chained up so long she resembled a skeleton hanging from Brude’s dungeon wall. Which raised a whole slew of new questions I wasn’t yet awake enough to deal with. I struggled to sit up. Vayl pulled back slightly. “You do?”
I reached up to kiss him, feather-light, on the chin, whispered, “Does this feel like the right time to you? The right place?”
“Yes.”
I laughed. His chuckle sounded less strangled every time he let it roll. And when heãll.ont let me up, his smile even looked less murderous than usual. “Shall I wait for you, then?”
“Up to you. I won’t be long.”
I spent five minutes in the bathroom and came out feeling a lot more like the old Jaz, who would never have dreamed of biting her opponent on the neck. At least I hadn’t suffered any bad effects from it. Yet, whispered a new voice in my mind, one I’d never heard before and didn’t have time now to pinpoint.
At six thirty in the morning Tearlach stopped reflecting the personalities of its owners and guests, and began to show its own individual quirks. A light rain had begun outside, along with a wind that made the house whisper and creak as we walked down the hall toward the stairs. Vayl could see in the dark, and with my contact lenses activated, so could I. The knickknacks and frills that had seemed homey in the light now took on a spook-house freakishness as we passed them.
We crept up the stairs, Vayl moving silently inside his camouflage, me shielded by my Sensitivity and Bergman’s watch, Jack just naturally quiet on his padded feet. We reached the fourth-floor landing before I smelled it.
“Vayl. A witch is working a spell here,” I whispered.
“Yes, you told me. The Haighs—”
“No, a witch. A Wiccan, like Tolly.”
Cole met us a few steps into the hallway, his eyes wide and glittering as he swung them from my face to Vayl’s. “Look at the doors,” he whispered, shining his flashlight on the entrance to Floraidh’s room.
At first it looked like any quaint old door that’s been painted repeatedly. A dull shine reflected the off-white Floraidh had chosen to color her entryway. She’d hung a basket of silk forget-me-nots under the room number.
“You know what, I don’t think the paint on that door was cracked when I opened it earlier this evening,” I said.
“Look at Dormal’s,” he murmured as he swung the light in that direction.
Hers was in even worse shape. Paint had peeled down in strips, as if a clawed hand had scraped it top to bottom. The door creaked, and then the diamond-embedded symbol on its upper-right-hand corner flared, as if it had begun to burn deep within the wood. The jewel itself glittered so brightly I’d have believed the sun was shining straight on it if the window wasn’t shaded.
Cole swung his light to Floraidh’s door. We watched the same action take place there. And then, as suddenly as I might snap my fingers, the scent of Wicca died.
“It’s gone,” I said.
“It is?” Cole trained his light all around the hallway as if to catch the culprit who’d tried, and failed, to breach the Scidairans’ defenses. “Was it Bea?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t scent witchery at Castle Hoppringhill when all those snakes appeared. So either she was trying to mask herself there because she was in public . . .”
Vayl flicked Cole’s light off. “Or Floraidh has ãorae stwo mortal enemies staying under her roof.”
After such an exciting start to the day, you’d have thought the action would swing right on into overdrive.
Nope.
Vayl went back to his room to crawl into his specially made blackout bed-tent.
After sleeping until one in the afternoon, Albert accepted the news about Mom and our plan to deal with her remarkably well. He grabbed a bite to eat and took Jack back to my room to watch a My Family marathon until we decided we needed them.
Cole and I took turns napping, attending GhostCon events with Albert and Jack like we really gave a crap about the feng shui of a haunted foyer, and watching Floraidh. Since our ward spent most of the day in her room concocting weird Scidair spells while Dormal looked after the B and B, we’d had to improvise our stalker spot, turning the walk-in linen closet beside Dormal’s room into a Scidair-hide. I came up with the name. It helped alleviate my minor claustrophobia to imagine I was a National Geographic photographer, surrounded by vast expanses of jungle, just waiting for the elusive kangahipposeal to appear, at which time I’d film that sucker like a paparazzi on speed.
We furnished the Scidair-hide with a laptop and folding chair, from which we eyeballed the empty hallway like we thought the walls were about to sprout ninjas. Sure, it would’ve been a lot more comfortable, not to mention safer, to guard her from one of our rooms. But if Bea tried something during the day, seconds would count. And though I could move a lot faster than I used to, I still wasn’t superhuman enough to race up two flights of stairs in time to save her from an assassin standing right at her door.