Fae Touched Read online

  The mattress, though big for Ellie, wasn’t long enough for me.

  She reappeared with an armful of thick white towels. “They’re warm,” she said. “I keep them next to the hearth.”

  She’d already wrapped one around her shoulders. She’d put on new socks and arm warmers under her nightgown, too. The other towels, she handed to me as she sat next to me.

  Warmth radiated off the fabric. Heat crackled from the fire. Yet all I saw was that Ellie still shivered.

  I didn’t dare touch her again. Not until I could do so without causing harm.

  She wrapped one of the fluffy towels around my head. “Does the door look different?”

  I glanced over her shoulder. The…

  What was I looking at? Something important was there, but not at the same time, as if the concealment enchantments had done to it what it did to my memories each evening. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “Every evening, my concealment enchantments crash against the world. Then they crash against my cottage.” She touched my cheek. “I think they’re crashing against you.” She stroked my face before touching my lips. “They are,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “You’re here.” Her kiss was as warm as the towel, and as soft. “That’s all I care about.”

  My breath hitched. Two hundred years of living with magicals, of seeing and feeling and surviving, of learning how to be my own rock under the creature sunning itself for warmth…

  Not the creature itself. Not the living man.

  Ellie looked toward the cottage’s door. Her brow furrowed. “Could you wait, please?” she said.

  I swear the cottage responded. I swear the sparks of pixie light, of bright yellows and whites and perfect, shimmering pinks that popped in and out of existence on the edges of this place—the edges of my mind—made a memory of a conversation. A node of a past that happened, but didn’t happen. I knew about it anyway, as if I was standing on the other side of a veil between one realm and another, experiencing the same time but not the same space.

  One side, me in Alfheim; the other, the cottage’s fae realm.

  It didn’t matter which side I was on, as long as I was with Ellie.

  Then she pulled me down onto the bed. “The magic’s going to make us sleep,” she whispered.

  Marcus Aurelius sighed. The fire warmed my back and a tingling release moved through my flesh. My beautiful Ellie kissed my cheek.

  And I think sleep came even before I closed my eyes.

  Chapter 3

  The magic—or the cottage itself, I couldn’t tell which—wanted me to learn, but not in a book kind of way. It wanted me to understand, which I did. Or at least I thought I did. I lived with elves. I understood the energy of magic and its patterns and its lights.

  Yet I was about to get a lesson in the magical equivalent of quantum field theory.

  The scientifically-minded people of the world figured out a long time ago that every “complete” system was actually a node manifested out of the finer grains of another larger, more complex system. Such was how the universe made itself.

  Magic was no different.

  The elves were part of the universe. They were an important part, a strong part that had coalesced as a self-sustaining magical ecosystem. The elves who had been born of the Nordic pantheon had found a way to become fertile. They birthed babies like their mundanes, but they also wielded the magic of their gods.

  There weren’t many truly self-sustaining magical groups. The elves. The kami. The fae. Most of the others were spirits that manifested. They weren’t born. They could sometimes make babies like Akeyla, but they were much more dependent on their mundanes rubbing against the natural world than the elves were.

  There were other elf-like magicals out there. Small groups in the Middle East, Africa, India, and in pockets of Oceania. A few still walked the world in South America. Arne once told me the loa were the only group who protected their witches. Rose may have been loa-born, as had the woman I’d faced in my suicide-by-witch attempt in Louisiana.

  The power of magic arose from the rubbing of humanity against nature. That rip, that spark, made eddies. And sometimes those eddies, if strong enough, tighten into life magic. Or if those forces happen on the other side of the dominion veil, death magic.

  Vampires. Demons. Gods of the dead.

  This I knew. This much was as obvious as gravity.

  But I’d met other magicals.

  The fire heated the air inside the cottage. Outside, wind howled and ice pellets bounced against the window. The ice added a high-pitched tinkling to the log’s lower crackle in a strange, semi-rhythmic cadence. The world breathed as if startled, in quick icy inhalations and lower, halting pops of warmth.

  Ellie, though, breathed slow and steady in her sleep. I did, as well. I dreamed lucidly of this place, and its library—there was a library here, somehow out of sight in a space that was half the size of my own cabin. It was here, real, yet unavailable and unseen until the cottage said so.

  I had to learn, first. I had to understand.

  The cottage’s magic wafted in the fire’s updrafts as a thick sturdy column of earthy browns. Blues and greens wavered like the rustling leaves of a tree.

  A tree I knew.

  The world had other spirits.

  Raven was more than the sum of her corvid mythologies. The World Wolf was more than the sum of its weres and its wolves. There were others. A cat. A raptor. A snake and a stag. World spirits of sea, air, and land.

  Whoever built Ellie’s cottage had called on more than fae magic. She’d pulled on the shadows of the dark forests and beasts that shelter under those limbs. Yet Ellie shimmered like the sun herself.

  Why? In my dream state, I did not know. But the cottage did, and she touched the tattoo of Yggdrasil that coiled along the side of my head.

  The parts that still burned from St. Martin’s magic healed. That pain, at least, left my body. The World Tree gave me this boon.

  And I think, in the dream, I understood. It wouldn’t matter in the morning. That “understanding” would vanish under a layer of articulation that did not connect the correct words to the concepts I’d just learned.

  But it would be there, deep in my sturdy bones and my strong tall limbs. And the World Tree was satisfied.

  Marcus Aurelius had always been a polite hound. He never barked to wake me in the mornings. He didn’t claw or jump on the bed. My dog laid his head on the mattress next to my pillow, his big puppy snout as close to my face as he could get it, and let out a small, concerned whine.

  I always wondered if he thought I was truly dead.

  This morning, instead of the whine, he licked my nose. I went from the darkness right at the boundary between the dream world and waking, to a sudden awareness that my dog had needs.

  I wasn’t in my bed. I wasn’t in my house. There’d been an elf and I’d trekked…

  I rolled over.

  Ellie slept on the other side of the mattress under a mountain of blue and green blankets. Only a little of her skin was visible inside her cocoon of warmth, mostly her cheek, and strands of her auburn hair pooled just under the bone. She sighed, and her eyes twitched. She was sound asleep.

  I was in Ellie’s bed, in her cottage somewhere in the woods near my lake. In her fae-magicked home. The same place that last night had hit me with fae drunkenness. And a primal, magical dream.

  I was supposed to understand something I didn’t remember. But of course I wouldn’t remember. Fae magic was all about the gut and the limbic system.

  Ellie smacked her lips and sighed again.

  I was close enough I could thread my hand under that mound of blankets and set it on the roundness of her hip. I could move close and stroke those strands off her cheek and whisper “Good morning.” But I was cold.

  Ice cold, to the point that I was well aware of my own chill. I’d been out in the snow before I came here and hadn’t had time to warm in front of the fire before the cotta
ge knocked me out for its late-night magical light show.

  Ellie didn’t need to be touched by an iceberg.

  I gently rolled toward my dog. He sniffed at my face, then lifted his head as if to look over my shoulder at Ellie.

  He couldn’t unless he jumped onto the bed. Which didn’t make sense, because the mattress was on the floor. Except it wasn’t. What had been a mattress was now a bed—a huge bed, one at least three feet longer and wider than it had been last night. The boxes at the head of the mattress were still there, but now they sat in a bookcase-like headboard. The blankets had also grown in size. While we slept, the bed had adjusted to me.

  I slowly sat up. The window hadn’t changed. It still snowed outside, but the flakes were fewer and farther apart, and the sky lightened. The cloud cover lessened.

  The settee that had been pushed to the wall was gone. The two chairs were still there, as was the small table between them, but the big piece of furniture had vanished to make enough room to walk comfortably around the new and improved bed.

  The creaky spiral stairs were still around the corner of the hearth, which also hadn’t changed. The painting over the fireplace looked different. I couldn’t put my finger on how, other than I was pretty sure the colors had moved from reddish to more blues and purples and that the overall pattern of the landscape depicted had somehow shifted.

  When I’d come in, the kitchen on the other side of the arch had been dark. I’d gotten a sense of it anyway, of the table and the sink and the counters, and how it filled the other part of the cottage I’d seen from outside. There was a second exterior door in there somewhere, one that led to the part of the yard with the pump. All had seemed correct spatially, and I hadn’t paid attention.

  The space no longer made sense.

  The front door now opened into an added mudroom. A glimpse of the new external wall was just visible through the big window. On the other side of the new room, the kitchen had been greatly expanded. Something warm and golden glowed in there just outside my line of sight.

  Ellie sighed in her sleep. My hound wagged his tail as if he expected me to figure out where the magical mystical cottage stored the dog food.

  I patted his head. “Hold on,” I whispered.

  He did a small hound shake, then backed toward the embers in the hearth. I swung my legs off the bed. I was still in my t-shirt and jeans, which was probably for the best. The fabric had likely kept my body from radiating its cold toward Ellie as we slept.

  I needed either high-intensity exercise or to stoke the fire. I added two logs, doing my best to be gentle and quiet, then turned toward the kitchen and my hound’s quest to be let out, and for food.

  He watched me from the arch. I followed him through into what I thought was just a kitchen.

  The cottage had added a sunroom during the night. What had been the outside snow-covered area with the pump and the pond was now inside under a passive solar roof. A small waterfall aerated the water, and fish plimped at the surface as if they, too, were looking to be fed. A small horde of plants filled in around the pond. Some were tropical, like the big umbrella tree, and others were small harvestable herbs and leafy greens.

  And there, in the middle of the big plants, was a pallet with a thick, bed-sized cushion like the one I sat on when sunning myself on my deck.

  Marcus Aurelius trotted toward the doggy door carved into the wall next to the back door. “That explains your comings and goings,” I muttered. The cottage gave my dog his own door. It also built me a golden-glowing, so warm I felt the heat radiating from the pallet, sunning spot.

  Rejuvenation magic swirled around it in soft, slow waves, the kind that recharged and balanced. It was often place-specific and dependent on the ambient energy of the nature around it. The elves had built a few similar places, most of which were inside the magic bubble surrounding The Great Hall.

  I had never asked for such a spell to be created along my lakeshore. I wanted to learn to do the calming myself. I would rather it be centered in me than in someone else’s magic.

  Yet one night inside Ellie’s concealment enchantments, and her fae-magical cottage built me this extraordinary gift.

  Should I be afraid? I should be afraid. Fae gifts were often not… balanced.

  But that was the way of the fae. Either you were all-in, or you were fighting not to drown under the all-in you wished to escape.

  I glanced back at the bed, then back at the pallet. I had a choice here. One I wasn’t quite sure what to make of, because like all fae-created choices, there was no way it was about the obvious alternatives. This was not about going all-in with Ellie. It wasn’t about falling in love with a fae-born witch, or the family-blending work we had coming.

  This wasn’t about the mundane parts of dating. This was about going all-in with Ellie’s magic.

  Marcus Aurelius escaped through his doggy door. A puff of cold rolled along the floor, under the kitchen table, and to my feet.

  “I live with elves,” I said to the cottage. “They’re the family that comes with me. This is their land. If I’m going to deal with your magic, you’re going to have to deal with them.” Was I offering the cottage a deal? I’m an idiot, I thought. Never make a deal with the fae.

  “Frank?”

  I looked back through the arch at the bed just as the mound of blankets exploded.

  “Frank?” Ellie shrieked.

  I’d been quiet. I’d let her sleep. She didn’t know where I was. “I’m in the kitchen!” I should have realized.

  I’d panicked my girlfriend.

  Chapter 4

  Ellie burst from the bed. “Don’t do that!” she shouted.

  I wasn’t sure her reaction was about me not waking her, but it was a pretty good bet. “You were sleeping. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  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 t
o 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.”