Peter touched his chest where the long, feathery pattern had been branded into his skin by a lightning strike. Kiya had a name for it—“lightning flower.” Gregory himself had a similar mark spreading across his back at the shoulders, but he never bothered much about how or why he had it. “Not in the way you can. I can’t manifest lightning except when Kiya and I . . .” He gave an embarrassed cough and stopped.
Gregory decided that was a subject he had no business pursuing, and so he merely returned to his sense of frustration and irritation over the delay. An hour later, a car pulled up at the front of the shop, this one carrying two men. Both were built like bulls, with thick, almost nonexistent necks that rolled down to shoulders rounded with muscle. Their jackets hid most of the outlines on their upper halves, but the way the fabric stretched across their wide backs signified that they were men who had a serious interest in a steroids company. The men didn’t look to the right or left; they simply entered the shop, not pausing when one of the remaining policeman called out for them to stop.
Gregory had a very bad feeling about those two men. He hadn’t forgotten what the reclamation agent had said about two thugs being on Gwen’s heels.
“I’m just going to check inside again,” he said, getting out of the car. “I need to be doing something.”
He didn’t wait for Peter’s response. There was no way in hell—the Welsh version of it or any other—that he was going to allow thugs or Death’s agent to claim Gwen. She was his.
In a professional sense, of course. Nothing more, despite the fact that he wouldn’t at all mind getting to know her better. Much, much better.
He shoved the erotic pictures that immediately popped into his mind out of it, and reminded himself that he had a job to do and that he’d be damned if he let someone else put that job in jeopardy.
The outer shop was empty of either a woman in a red suit or two thuglike bulls in human form. He smiled at the policewoman who was staring with a worried look at the supply room, and then he entered it.
It was empty.
He stepped farther into the room. The portal shimmered away in an annoying business-as-usual manner. He ground his teeth. He couldn’t go in. Not without permission. Peter had made that absolutely clear.
But those two men and Death’s agent had gone through it. They would get to Gwen first. And they might hurt her.
He couldn’t go. He couldn’t break the rules. Not again, not when he was so close to achieving what he most wanted out of life. Not when it would mean destroying not only his own professional future but his blossoming relationship with Peter, and more importantly, their plans for dragging fellow Travellers into society, where they could use their abilities for good.
He couldn’t throw away all of that just to capture one woman.
One delectably enticing woman.
“Damn everything to perdition and back,” he snarled, and pushed his way through the portal.
It was the noise that he noticed first. Or rather, the lack of it. It was quiet in Anwyn, the sort of rural, pastoral quiet that comes with birds going cheerfully about their business, sheep and cattle lazily grazing away with nary a tail swipe at irritating flies, and the soft wafting of gentle breezes about one’s temples. It was, in short, as idyllic a spot as any place he had ever seen. More so, given the lack of the irritations that had plagued his life ever since he had joined the Watch.
He stood next to a low stone wall, the kind made by farmers for hundreds of years out of rocks turned over from plowing. On the far side of the wall lay a faint dirt track. Behind him rose a large rock, about twelve feet high. He took that to be the portal out to the mortal world, since the way out was frequently separate from the way in.
“Hello, cow,” he greeted a brown and white cow that was grazing near him. She was a clean cow, her whites very white, her browns a rich milk chocolate, her hooves shiny. He wasn’t overly familiar with the world of cows as a whole, but brief glances he’d had out of car windows when passing through farmland had led him to believe that cows were frequently splattered with mud and feces. Particularly their hindquarters. And yet here was this cow, all shiny and clean and looking as if she would give already pasteurized milk. “I had no idea they had cows in the afterlife, but I guess you too need somewhere to go when you die. You look plump and clean and happy, so this is good. Have you seen a woman named Gwen?”
The cow stretched out her neck and snuffled his front.
“A smallish woman in a red suit?”
A large pink tongue emerged from the cow’s mouth. With a delicacy that surprised him, she tasted the buttons on his jacket.
“How about two large men with no necks? You couldn’t miss them; they’re roughly the same size as you.”
She returned to snuffling his chest. Her ears wiggled happily.
“I’ll take that as a no. Or as a statement that I smell good to cows. Good day, madam.” He patted the cow on the head, stepped over the low wall, and strode off down the dirt track, wondering just how he would find Gwen. And whether or not the others had already found her.
“I’m not going to worry about what I’ve done,” he said aloud to a large green, white, and black bird as it flew in front of him across the track, a few twigs in its beak. The bird fluttered in a circle around him, then alighted on the stone wall, spitting out the twigs.
For one startled moment, he expected it to speak. It didn’t. It just cocked its head as it looked at him, picked up a twig, and flew over to drop it at his feet. It then flew a few feet at right angles to the path.
He looked at the twig. “A present? How thoughtful of you.” He retrieved the stick and examined it. It did not, alas, have Gwen’s current whereabouts engraved on it. “I would reciprocate, but I have no idea what to get a bird.”
The bird fluttered a few feet, then landed on the grass, clearly watching him.
“I’m not the smartest man in the world, you know,” he told the bird, “but I’m also not the most obtuse. Do you want me to follow you?”
The bird just sat there, waiting for him.
He pointed down the track. “There’s no cow or sheep shit if I go that way. There’s bound to be some if I cross the fields.”
The bird spat up a beetle, twisted its head around to look at the carcass, then consumed it again.
Gregory grimaced. “What the hell. It’s not like I’m not up to my elbows in it already.”
He left the path and headed toward the bird, which immediately took wing and flew about a hundred feet ahead, then paused and waited for him. “Your name wouldn’t be Lassie, would it?”
Gregory followed the bird for some time, the bemused feeling of being led by an animal eventually fading, allowing regret to darken his mood. “I’ll get fired for sure. Peter will be angry as hell, but with time he might forgive me. My grandmother will be sure to hold my failure over my head for the rest of my life. But nothing I can do now will change any of that, will it?”
The bird said nothing, but continued to lead him through trees, and up and down the rolling hills. Despite his brave words, he did, in fact, fret over the situation that his impatience had cast upon him, but all the chiding words he hurled at himself faded away when he passed through a small copse of trees and crested a slight hill. Before him lay a panorama of . . . well, he was hard put to name exactly what it was. More gently rolling green hills. Periodic clumps of trees. A stream, silvery bright, cut a serpentine path through the hills and wound its way past him on the right. Fluffy white blobs that were no doubt spotlessly clean sheep dotted the grassy undulations, the latter of which were sprinkled with the yellow, red, and blue of wildflowers. Large blobs indicated more cows. But it was the man-made structures that held his attention.