Tangled Webs

Jaenelle gave her one of those long, assessing looks. “Admit it. This has made you shudder and shiver a lot of the time, but you’ve also had fun.”

“I don’t have to admit anything,” Marian replied. But she smiled when she said it. Just outside the dining room, where people would be waiting for their turn to enter, was a dusty table with a vase of dead flowers. Swipe a finger in the dust—or even better, have one of the landen boys write his name in the dust—and the next thing that appeared was the words “hello, prey.”

She’d thought of that one all by herself.

It was the mix of the absurd, the creepy, and the real that was making the spooky house more than the dumb ideas the landen boys had originally told Jaenelle. Now there were ghostly guides directing people through the house and telling them bits of stories so they would know what to look for in each room. There were phantom shapes that would appear in one of the mirrors, but the spell didn’t engage until someone looked in the mirror. As you walked down one part of the upstairs hallway, you heard a heart-breakingly beautiful voice singing—Jaenelle’s voice, in fact—but if you backtracked to hear it again, it was gone.

And then there were the other guides.

“Nobody is going to be scared of a Sceltie,” Marian said as the two illusion-spell dogs—one black with tan markings on his face, the other brown and white—trotted into the dining room and stared at the humans, their expressions just a little too gleeful.

“That’s because these people don’t live with a Sceltie,” Jaenelle replied.

Marian studied the illusions, whose tails began to wag now that she focused her attention on them. “How complex a spell is this?”

“They’ll be able to interact with the visitors in the most usual ways.”

A wicked cheerfulness shivered through Marian. “In other words, they’re going to herd the landen children going through the house.”

“They can touch you; you can’t touch them,” Jaenelle said, tipping her head toward the dogs. “Your hand will pass right through, but you’ll certainly feel it if one of them nips you.”

She was starting to like this house better and better. Those landen boys wanted to see how the Blood lived? They thought it was all cobwebs in the corners and rats in the walls? Ha! Let them try to deal with the kindred!

“Howdid we end up with Sceltie ghosts?” Marian asked.

A blush stained Jaenelle’s cheeks. “When I went to Scelt to ask Fiona to polish up the little story bits we wrote, Ladvarian and Shadow heard us talking. And since Kaelas got to be the snarl in the cellar and the ghost cat that’s seen from one of the upstairs windows…”

“They nipped at you until you gave in, didn’t they?”

“Badgered. There were no teeth involved. Mine or theirs.”

Oh, the sour note in Jaenelle’s voice.

Marian turned away to hide a grin. The powerful men in Jaenelle’s life didn’t often win an argument with her. On the other hand,she seldom won an argument with Ladvarian. Did it annoy Lucivar, Daemon, and Saetan to see a dog that didn’t come up to their knees cornering Jaenelle into agreeing to things when they couldn’t get her to budge, or were they grateful thatsomeone could successfully herd their darling Queen when herding was required?

“All right,” Jaenelle said briskly. “We have one more room that needs significant work.” She left the dining room and led the way to the room that must have been a parlor. “This will be the scariest room in the house.”

Marian looked at the furniture and wallpaper and thought the room qualified without their doing anything to it. “What’s going to be in here?”

Oh, the look in Jaenelle’s eyes as she said softly, “A promise.”

Entering one of the small parlors that were in Witch’s private section of the Keep, Daemon used Craft to move another cushioned footstool next to the one that held Saetan’s socked feet. Then he sat down and studied his father as Saetan closed the book he was reading and took off the half-moon glasses.

“Nice sweater,” Daemon said dryly, eyeing the long black sweater Saetan was wearing over a white silk shirt.

“Nice shirt,” Saetan replied just as dryly, confirming Daemon’s suspicion that Saetan owned the sweater for the same reason he now owned this shirt. “The gold looks good on you.”

“I have other clothes besides white shirts and black trousers,” Daemon grumbled.

“If you don’t, you will.” Saetan smiled. “Have any of your silk shirts found their way into your Lady’s closet?”

“No.” Daemon felt amusement bubble up. “My shoulders are broader than yours, so my shirts don’t fit as well as yours did. I gathered this was a disappointment. In terms of the shirts, not the shoulders.”

“Lucky you.”

He grinned at the sour note he heard in Saetan’s voice. Then his amusement faded as he called in a packet of letters tied with a rose-colored ribbon. “Sylvia wrote these,” he said softly. “There are a couple from the boys as well. I told her I would offer them, but you don’t have to take them.” Especially now when he could see the pain gathering in his father’s gold eyes. “I can keep them, or destroy them, or read them if you feel someone needs to know the contents. I will do with them whatever you want me to do.”

“I can’t take them,” Saetan said, his voice strained. “It’s selfish, I know that, but…”

Daemon vanished the packet and rested a hand on Saetan’s ankle. “You’re entitled to make that choice.”

“There are reasons why the demon-dead have their own Realm. There are reasons for the dead to step back from the living. And those same reasons apply to Guardians.”

Step back from whomever you must,Daemon thought.Except me. Except Lucivar.

“You and Lucivar…” Saetan smiled that dry smile. “When I first told the two of you I was retiring from the living Realms, I heard the unspoken warning about what you’d do if I tried to shut myself too far away from all of you. And I wouldn’t have tried to shut you out. Not my children. Not you or Lucivar or Jaenelle. Not from the coven or the boyos, since they, too, are my children in a way.”

“They’ve taken the lessons and the love and gone on with their lives. They aren’t placing any demands on you. Just small expectations, when there are any at all.”

Saetan hesitated. “At this point, my darling, you and the others are fine entertainment most of the time. Not just for me. For Geoffrey and Draca as well. Even Lorn. Once a week, I go down to visit and read him the letters from the coven. The Darkness only knows what the legendary Prince of the Dragons thinks of the content.” Another smile, there and gone. “But it’s not the same with Sylvia.”

“No, it’s not the same.” It could never be the same with a lover who truly touched a man’s heart. He gave his father’s ankle a friendly squeeze, then sat back on the footstool. “There are going to be some changes in her household. That may not be easier for her initially, but it will be different.”

“Oh?”

“I walked down to the village with five Sceltie puppies. I came back to the Hall with four.”

“And the fifth?”

“By now, I’m sure Sylvia has convinced the little bitch to let go of Mikal’s trousers. And Mrs. Beale promised to send her recipe for puppy biscuits to Sylvia’s cook.”

“Mrs. Beale agreed to share a recipe,” Saetan said slowly.

“Mrs. Beale agreed that I could pay for…I’m not sure what it is except that it’s something she wanted for the kitchen but couldn’t justify as a normal household expense.”

“And you agreed to fund this in exchange for a recipe?”

Daemon stared at his father for a long moment before he muttered, “She sharpened the meat cleaver before coming to talk to me.”

One beat of silence. Two. Then Saetan burst out laughing.

Almost time. Everything was almost ready. Big surprises soon. Just a few details left to handle.

Almost ready.

Soon.

And then they would see how many of his surprises the SaDiablo family could survive.

PART TWO

EIGHT

Lucivar braced his elbows on the kitchen table, clamped his hands on either side of his head—and squeezed.

What was wrong with Rihlanders that they had to puteverything down on paper? And why send this crap tohim ? If Jhinkas were attacking a village in Ebon Rih—or any part of Askavi for that matter—he wanted to know about it because he would be the one stepping onto the killing field to take care of it. But why in the name of Hell did he need five pages of scribbles from some Queen’s Steward to tell himnothing was wrong ? And if hehad to get stuck in this bog of words, why couldn’t the fool who wrote it have the courtesy of having penmanship that a person could read?

Thank the Darkness Daemon took care of all the family business. For reasons he had never understood, Daemonliked paperwork.

He didn’t mind the twice-a-month meeting to review the properties and wealth held by the SaDiablo family. They were necessary, and the Dhemlan estate that was part of his inheritance and the people who worked on that land were his responsibility. But Daemon didn’t make him read all those damn bits of paper just to tell him nothing was wrong.

Normally he thought of the paperwork that came with being the Warlord Prince of Ebon Rih as the equivalent of having a smashed toe—you just gritted your teeth and limped your way through it. But today it was raining, Marian was gone, and Daemonar and a wolf pup were entertaining themselves by making a lot of noise in the next room. If this had been summer, he would have stripped off the boy’s clothes and chucked those two outside, figuring a little water wouldn’t hurt any of them—as long as he got boy and pup cleaned up and dried off before their mothers returned. But it was a chilly autumn day and a cold rain, so he was stuck with paperwork, noise, and—bang bang bang