Starfire (Grim Gate 2)

“Babe?” Ethan calls, opening the attic door. “What are you doing? I thought you went upstairs to brush your teeth.”

“I did.” I pull my blanket tighter around my shoulders and climb over a dresser. “But then I thought I’d come up and find one more box full of helpful items.”

Ethan raises an eyebrow. “And did you?”

“No.” I hop off the dresser and shimmy over to the bookshelf. Sam will be here in a day or so, and this would really tie the room together. I heft a box of junk that I’d already sorted through off and turn, shivering. I pull another box off and accidentally knock the wooden box full of ashes to the ground. The lid pops open and I make a face, mentally debating if I need to be respectful of whatever dead pet this is and try to sweep up the ashes or just leave it, sweeping it up later when the attic is finally cleared out.

Picking up the box, I’m surprised to see there are no ashes at all. Dammit. They must be underneath more crap, and I’m way too cold to shuffle more stuff around tonight.

“Let me help at least,” Ethan says, coming over to me. We end up bringing three boxes into the attic landing. It’s still chilly up here but feels so much warmer than being in the actual attic. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“I really want to find a picture of my aunt’s familiar. It’s crazy, right? I never outgrew being that horse-obsessed girl and Aunt Estelle’s familiar took the form of a horse.”

“I don’t think we can say anything is a coincidence anymore.” He looks at Hunter, who’s lazily watching us dig through the boxes. “A dog or cat makes more sense to me. You can take them anywhere.”

“But you can’t ride them,” I add, earning a glare from Hunter. “Though, you’re right. Hunter really can go anywhere. More and more places are allowing dogs to come inside, but you can’t just show up with a horse.”

We spend the next twenty minutes sorting through the stuff in the boxes. One is full of old fiction romance novels, and another has an art project Harrison and I made. They don’t provide any sort of information, but it’s entertaining to look at them, hoping they spark a memory.

They don’t.

The third box is full of schoolbooks, ranging from accounting to the magical properties of commonly found gemstones. I take the books about magic downstairs, adding them to the library shelves. It’s getting late, and the wind has picked up outside. The house creaks and groans with each gust, making the power flicker.

I clean Romeo’s cage as Ethan looks up stuff about getting a generator installed, and the power goes out right after we get into bed. Knowing we’ll wake up freezing, we move into the library, making a nest of blankets on the floor by the fireplace. I put Romeo in his small cage and set it on the coffee table.

It would be easy to be freaked out with the house dark and quiet like this, but I’m warm and safe, snuggled up with Ethan next to me and Hunter by my feet. We both drift to sleep for several hours, and I wake to Ethan adding another log to the fire.

The power is still off when we get up in the morning, and I have to take pots of hot water out to the barn to thaw water buckets since my heated buckets are no longer working. It’s annoying, yet almost fun in a way, and we heat up soup over the fire, eating it tucked in blankets in the library. We keep ourselves busy playing board games, having sex, and snuggling in blankets by the fire most of the day. Finally, driving into Thorne Hill to eat at Susie’s Café for dinner.

Sam calls Ethan when we’re headed back, saying she arrived in South Bend, about an hour from us. I wasn’t familiar with the location of the city, but it’s to the east of us, and coming here really isn’t on her way home to New York. Really, though, I don’t care if she comes to visit. My parents and Harrison came to visit this Christmas, staying at the house with us.

The house has four bedrooms. One is ours, one is currently Romeo’s, and the other two were set up as bare-bones guest rooms. I have one fully decorated now, and I’ll get to the other one eventually. I absolutely love living with Ethan. It’s really made us get to know each other, both the good and the bad. It was fun hosting a holiday together and, though I know I made the right decision to pack up and move halfway across the country, I missed my family. I’m looking forward to them coming again for another visit, and I can’t wait until Laney can come out this spring when she gets some time off work.