Damsel Under Stress (Enchanted, Inc. 3)

The Eatons’ home looked like one of those elaborate gingerbread houses hotel pastry chefs do for display during the holidays. It was an ornate Victorian built from warm brown brick, with lots of peaks, eaves, chimneys, and green-painted woodwork. The icing of snow on the roof added to the gingerbread effect. All it was missing was a row of gumdrops along the roof ridges. “Oh, what a wonderful house,” I said in awe.

“Yes, it is quite the Victorian pile of bricks,” James said. “And in case you were wondering, we’re not the original owners.” I turned just in time to catch the twinkle in his eye, and I couldn’t help but smile back. I decided that I liked him.

Owen pulled into a detached garage that looked like it once must have been a carriage house. It was perfectly neat and organized rather than being the repository for junk that garages tend to be. That was my first sense of what I might be getting into. James’s relative friendliness and good humor had lulled me into complacency, but anyone who kept a garage neat enough that you could have a party in there was someone to be reckoned with.

My next hint that this wasn’t going to be anything like my visits home came when we went around to the front door to enter the house. Back home, we always came in through the kitchen. Our front door may have gone years without being opened. The entry foyer of this house was wide and floored with dark, polished wood overlaid with an antique Oriental rug. An equally polished staircase with an intricately carved banister twisted its way from the back of the foyer up to the next floor. James took off his hat, revealing a thinning shock of white hair, then took my coat and hat from me as Owen took care of his own coat in a closet under the stairs.

There was a snuffling sound, and soon a black Lab came into the foyer from an adjacent room. It breathed as though it was running full speed, but moved at a snail’s pace, its tail wagging feebly. The white around its muzzle indicated that in dog years it was about as old as James was. The dog made a painfully slow beeline to Owen, who moved to meet it halfway, then knelt and scratched its head fondly. “So you do remember me, Arawn,” he said.

James sniffed. “Of course he remembers you. When you leave he’ll stare out the front window for a couple of days like he’s hoping you’ll come back. You spoiled him when he was a puppy.” It was the first hint of the disapproval Owen had mentioned when he told me about his strained relationship with his foster parents, but I thought James’s tone was more fond than critical. Judging by what I knew about how long dogs like that lived—I’d had one very much like Arawn when I was growing up—this one must have been a puppy around the time Owen was in his late teens, maybe just before he went off to college.

gave me a smile that was warm and genuine, even if it wasn’t all that broad. His face looked like it might shatter if he tried a broad grin. He clasped my hand in both of his own and said, “I’m pleased you could join us for the holiday, Katie.” He had a clipped Yankee accent with perfect enunciation.

“Thank you so much for having me,” I replied, trying and failing to fight my own accent. So far, this man didn’t seem to be a monster, and either he was fully human or a being that looked human because I didn’t see anything odd.

James turned to Owen. “I hope you don’t mind driving,” he said. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

“Not at all,” Owen replied. “Let me get our bags loaded.” James handed him the keys, and he put our bags in the back of the car. While he did that, James opened the door to the backseat and got inside. Owen opened the front passenger door for me, then once I was inside, he went around to the driver’s side, where he had to adjust the seat before starting the car.

The road from the station into town was so steep I thought I’d have to get out and help push the car up it. It was a good thing there was no ice or there would have been no way to get up that hill. The buildings that lined the road were stair-stepped into the hill, which gave them a quaint appearance. The town itself looked like something out of a storybook, complete with the fairy fluttering down the sidewalk with shopping bags over her arm. Gnomes tended the grounds in front of the gothic town hall, looking very much like those in that store window we’d seen the day before.

“You’ve got quite the magical population here,” I remarked. “Or is it this way in all the towns in this part of the world?”

“This particular village was settled by magical folk,” James said. “Almost everyone in town is magical or somehow associated with magic.”

I tried not to gawk as we drove through the village center, turned onto a major road, and then turned again to go up yet another steep hill. Most of the homes seemed to be fairly old and fairly large, on spacious, well-groomed lots dotted with mature trees. Owen turned onto a side street, then into a driveway, whose wrought-iron gates swung open at our approach.

The Eatons’ home looked like one of those elaborate gingerbread houses hotel pastry chefs do for display during the holidays. It was an ornate Victorian built from warm brown brick, with lots of peaks, eaves, chimneys, and green-painted woodwork. The icing of snow on the roof added to the gingerbread effect. All it was missing was a row of gumdrops along the roof ridges. “Oh, what a wonderful house,” I said in awe.

“Yes, it is quite the Victorian pile of bricks,” James said. “And in case you were wondering, we’re not the original owners.” I turned just in time to catch the twinkle in his eye, and I couldn’t help but smile back. I decided that I liked him.

Owen pulled into a detached garage that looked like it once must have been a carriage house. It was perfectly neat and organized rather than being the repository for junk that garages tend to be. That was my first sense of what I might be getting into. James’s relative friendliness and good humor had lulled me into complacency, but anyone who kept a garage neat enough that you could have a party in there was someone to be reckoned with.

My next hint that this wasn’t going to be anything like my visits home came when we went around to the front door to enter the house. Back home, we always came in through the kitchen. Our front door may have gone years without being opened. The entry foyer of this house was wide and floored with dark, polished wood overlaid with an antique Oriental rug. An equally polished staircase with an intricately carved banister twisted its way from the back of the foyer up to the next floor. James took off his hat, revealing a thinning shock of white hair, then took my coat and hat from me as Owen took care of his own coat in a closet under the stairs.

There was a snuffling sound, and soon a black Lab came into the foyer from an adjacent room. It breathed as though it was running full speed, but moved at a snail’s pace, its tail wagging feebly. The white around its muzzle indicated that in dog years it was about as old as James was. The dog made a painfully slow beeline to Owen, who moved to meet it halfway, then knelt and scratched its head fondly. “So you do remember me, Arawn,” he said.

James sniffed. “Of course he remembers you. When you leave he’ll stare out the front window for a couple of days like he’s hoping you’ll come back. You spoiled him when he was a puppy.” It was the first hint of the disapproval Owen had mentioned when he told me about his strained relationship with his foster parents, but I thought James’s tone was more fond than critical. Judging by what I knew about how long dogs like that lived—I’d had one very much like Arawn when I was growing up—this one must have been a puppy around the time Owen was in his late teens, maybe just before he went off to college.

The dog finished greeting Owen and came over to investigate me. Even if I managed to screw up with Owen’s foster parents, I was pretty sure I could make a good impression on his dog. I bent and patted his head the way my old Lab used to like. This one increased the speed of his tail wagging, which I took as a sign of approval.

Then a voice rang in from another room. “James? Are you back from the station already?”

Both James and Owen automatically snapped to attention. Even the dog moved into the position you’d expect him to assume if you shouted, “Sit!” and faced in the direction from which the voice had come. I started to get a sense of why Owen was so nervous.

Eight

“We’ve just arrived,” James called out, then he said more quietly to us, “This way.” Owen followed him, looking like he was heading to his own execution, and the dog trotted faithfully at Owen’s heels. I grabbed the tin of homemade cookies I’d brought as a hostess gift from my bag, then brought up the rear, feeling more than a bit nervous, myself. I’d seen Owen in all kinds of scary situations, including an all-out magical battle involving monsters out of my worst nightmares, and I’d never seen him look this anxious.

The woman who stood waiting in the parlor was certainly formidable. She looked like the kind of character Katharine Hepburn played in her later years—the crusty, sharp-tongued, aristocratic octogenarian who turned out to have a warm, gooey center. It remained to be seen how gooey this woman was inside. She was tall—almost as tall as Owen, even with the shrinkage and slight stoop of age—and angular, with almost no hint of softness anywhere on her body. She had the kind of white hair that looks like it once was red, pulled up in a tight bun on top of her head, and her blue eyes were so sharp and piercing that I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find that one of her powers was X-ray vision.

She swept those all-seeing eyes past each of us. I got the sense she was collecting data to analyze later. The whole time, she stood totally still. If it hadn’t been for her eyes, I might have thought she was carved from granite. Or maybe ice.

But then she suddenly melted as her face softened into a smile. She stepped forward, took Owen by the shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek. He looked like he might faint at any moment, while James did the kind of double take Bob Hope built a career on. Even the dog made a funny little “whuh?” sound.

Just as abruptly, her eyes focused on me. It took every ounce of will I had not to step backward. “You must be Katie,” she said, clipping her words brusquely.

“Yes ma’am,” I said, fighting off the urge to curtsy. “Thank you so much for having me.” I thrust my tin of cookies toward her and tried to keep my hands from visibly shaking. “These are for you.”