“It is too early to be slipping, Mr. Steele,” Mr. Tom said, standing by the door.
A smile curled Austin’s lips. “But I did think of it. I’ll ask that you have patience.”
I frowned at him. “Sure, but I don’t need flowers.”
“Of course you do.” He nodded and turned, touching the small of my back. “Shall we?”
“Who did you want on detail, miss?” Mr. Tom asked.
“I will be accompanying you, miss, if acceptable.” Nathanial appeared in the sitting room doorway, in house sweats with his wings dusting his ankles, no small feat for a guy who was six-four.
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, knowing there was no point in telling them they didn’t need to come with two alpha shifters on scene. “Maybe Jasper, too, so there’s someone I’m connected with.”
“I’d like to go.” Hollace, the thunderbird, leaned against the wall at the top of the stairs, holding a book that rested against his thigh. “My liver is broken from trying to keep up with that Irishwoman at the bar last night. I need something peaceful to do, and this house keeps making the dolls knock on my door. It’s creepy.” He started down the stairs.
It turned out that as soon as I healed him (after I’d taken him down), and he got a little information about why I didn’t know his role, he lightened up significantly. He’d answered my summons, and that to him was a willingness to sign on, as weird as the situation might be.
I smiled. “Grab Jasper, would you?”
Hollace stopped and then retreated. “Yup.”
I nodded at Austin to get going.
“If it pleases milady,” he said softly, then led me to the Jeep and opened the passenger door for me.
“When do you plan on putting a bag over my head?” I asked while strapping myself in.
He climbed in the other side and started the Jeep up. “I didn’t know you were into that.”
“I’ve never seen where you live. I figured you were keeping it a secret.”
“Ah.” He clicked in his seatbelt and away we went. “No, it’s just that your house is safer. Well, safer for everyone except for Kingsley. I think those dolls have been giving him nightmares.”
“That guy doesn’t seem like he’d be scared of anything.”
We turned onto a small road that led away from town, barely two lanes and with trees pressing in on both sides.
“He’s not scared of much, that’s for sure. But Ivy House has a strange way of inducing fear.”
We wound around up the mountain, no shortage of them in the Sierras, the headlights clicking on as the sunlight dimmed, the day giving way to night.
“How are the new people coming along?” he asked, hitting a fork in the road and going left, winding higher still.
I thought back on the past week.
“Hollace and Nathanial are incredibly chill. Always very helpful. The phoenix just chirps because she’s too young to take human form, but she follows us around from room to room, or flies around the house. She has set fire to a few things, but the dolls run around with glasses of water to put them out, so that’s fine. They finally have a good purpose, but now we randomly have puddles, dribbles, and half-burned items littering the place.”
“Sounds like a good time.”
“Definitely not. Nathanial thanked me for summoning him, told me what an honor it was, and then basically just drifted into the background.”
“If he works out, he could be incredibly useful. I think we need to bring in more gargoyles so you can have an extended pack. You should have an army of them.”
“I would never be able to handle that many people answering to me,” I said, shuddering at the thought.
“They’d answer to Nathanial, and he would answer to you or me, depending on the circumstances. Chain of command. You handle him. He handles them.”
“And if he rises up against me?”
“He won’t. He has fully submitted to you. But if he tries anything, you could have Ivy House kill him in his sleep so you don’t have to do the dirty work.”
I smirked and looked out the window, at the dying light dancing through the pine needles.
“Hollace and the phoenix are mythical beings,” he said. “They’re magical creatures with human forms. Their souls live forever, born into new bodies. I don’t know the exact details, but creatures like them only join forces once in a great while, every few lifetimes. You clearly got a couple that were ready to shed their vacation clothes and get to work. Cyra made us work for it, but she wouldn’t have answered the summons if she wasn’t intrigued.”
“That makes me a little nervous.”
“It makes me a little giddy. Kingsley is as jealous as they come.”
The road opened up into a wide driveway leading to a two-story house. A huge, well-lit window looked out on an expanse of grass, pushed up against the woods at the back. Stone pillars bracketed the front porch, and the white door was flanked with colorful stained glass glinting in the porch lights. A wood deck hugged the second story and wrapped around the side. From my vantage point, I could see part of the house stepped up into the mountain, worked into the terrain. Its rustic look, all stone and wood and glass, fit in perfectly with the environment.