Juliet Dark - The Angel Stone

A cold breeze brushed against my back, insinuating itself down the neck of my damp blouse. I shivered at its touch … but then felt it warm as it crept down my back. It felt like a hand, as if the breeze had turned to flesh as it met my flesh—as Liam had gained flesh with my breath. And as the warm breeze coiled around my waist, I smelled heather.

William lifted his head and sniffed the air. His eyes met mine and I felt a spark of recognition. Pulled by that spark—and the invisible hand at my back—I stepped over the threshold.

While William went to work lighting a fire, I looked around the cottage. The central room contained the fireplace, with a settle and two chairs set before it. A spinning wheel had been knocked over, the wool from its bobbin strewn all over the floor. There was also a rudimentary kitchen consisting of a cupboard, an iron basin, and a cast-iron stove. There were two small rooms in the loft upstairs, one with an antique brass bed covered with wool blankets and a sheepskin, the other with a loom, more trunks, and piles of blankets and sheepskins. Mordag was a weaver as well as a shepherd, which made sense.

I grabbed an armful of blankets and sheepskins, then came upon a trunk full of clothes. I put the blankets down and stripped out of my wet clothes, carefully spreading them out over the loom to dry. I put on a long white cotton shift and picked out a nightshirt for William—there were no pants—then carried the blankets down the stairs. I found William crouched on the stone hearth in front of a roaring fire.

“Here,” I said, tossing him the nightshirt. “Put this on while I see if there’s any food.”

“There isna but a stale bannock or two, but I did find this.”

He held up an earthenware jug. I took it and smelled the peaty aroma of malt whiskey. Good scotch had been Liam’s weakness. Some things never changed, I supposed. Certainly the golden skin of the man before me …

I took a swig of the scotch to keep from looking at those long golden limbs. Turning away, I felt unaccountably shy. I’d been making love to this man in my dreams for weeks now—I’d made love to his incarnations for longer than that—but I didn’t know him. He looked at me as if he knew me, but that was because he thought I was the first Cailleach. He’d never met me—and he wouldn’t, I suddenly realized. I’d saved him before he became the incubus, so he would never come to me as Liam or Bill. I felt a sort of hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, but perhaps that was an aftereffect from emptying myself out to become the door. Certainly I should feel glad that I’d rescued William Duffy before he could become the incubus, but I didn’t. The man I’d fallen in love with—whatever combination of Bill and Liam that had been—had never existed. I’d rescued a total stranger.

A hungry and cold stranger.

I searched the cupboards for food. I found a number of glass jars full of dried herbs and a covered earthenware canister half full of oatmeal and another with hard biscuits—the bannocks William had spoken of, no doubt, although they didn’t resemble the warm, flaky biscuits my father used to make. Either seventeenth-century fare was spare or Mordag had planned to be away for a while and hadn’t stocked her kitchen before leaving—although I noticed that there was a bowl on the table half full of dried oatmeal, a wooden spoon congealing beside it. It looked as if Mordag had been having her morning porridge when she’d been interrupted and left suddenly.

I hadn’t come across any indoor plumbing on my exploration, so I went out back to relieve myself, squatting behind a lilac bush. In the moonlight I could see a pump, a neat garden sheltered in the lee of a stone wall, and an apple tree, all well tended and trimmed back for winter. Mordag hadn’t been gone for long.

I washed my hands at the pump and filled a tin bucket that hung beside it with water. The water was ice cold and tasted like snow, which I noticed was covering the tops of the moonlit mountains surrounding the cottage. There hadn’t been any snow in the Catskills when I left Fairwick. It gave me a hollow feeling that time was moving on, even though I knew that was absurd. The gulf of time separating me from my friends in Fairwick was far wider than a few weeks.

Shivering, as if I’d felt that wide gulf of time opening up under my feet, I hurried back into the cottage, which felt toasty warm now. William had arranged the sheepskins and blankets into a sort of couch in front of the fire and was reclining lazily, his bare legs ruddy in the firelight. I brought the water and bannocks over and busied myself filling a cast-iron kettle.

“I thought ye might’ve run away, lass,” he said when I finally sat down beside him. “Ye seem more scairt of me now than when I turned into a lion.”

“You remember that?” I asked, avoiding the question of me being afraid of him. He was right—I was. But why?

“Aye,” he said, his eyes glowing with mirth and reflected firelight. “I didn’t have any choice about it, mind, no more than I had these last seven years, but I knew how brave ye were—and how kind. To risk your own neck for a man ye’d only met that once, although …” He drew his legs under him and knelt in front of me, studying my face. “It was a once that I would never forget.” He leaned forward. His loose hair, falling in soft waves around his shadowed face, was lit red by the firelight behind him, making him look for a moment like the lion he’d turned into back at the well. When he touched my face, his hand felt as soft and warm as the lion’s fur.

I swallowed, feeling the pressure of his strong fingers on my skin. My voice sounded hoarse when I spoke. “There’s something I have to explain to you …” I began, before his lips touched mine. He leaned back on his heels and looked at me, a line creasing his brow. I resisted the urge to smooth it away.

“I’m not that girl,” I said, “the one you met in the Greenwood—Cailleach. I have the same name—although I go by Callie more often—but I’m not her. I’m … her descendant. I’ve come back through time.”

“What happened to her, then? The other Cailleach?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she had to leave Ballydoon because the witch hunters came and she tried to get back to Faerie, but it wasn’t the right time. I’ve dreamed about her. I think she saw you and tried to come through the door, but then she faded …”

A pained look crossed his face. “Aye, I half-remember that, but I thought it was a dream—I’ve had some awful dreams in the time I’ve spent in Faerie. If she didn’t come for me, then what happened to me?”

“You became an incubus,” I said. “You came to me twice as that creature, each time in a different guise.”

“Did I hurt ye, lass, when I came to ye as a demon?”

“No—or at least not physically. You rather broke my heart as Liam, but then when you came back as Bill you tried to make it up to me.”

“As if there were any way to make up for treating a lady badly!” He jerked away and flung himself back against the piled blankets and stared into the fire. “There were things I did when I was in Faerie … things I remember … I don’t know if they were real or no’. There were great feasts at which we ate and drank like kings for days and nights on end, only there wasn’t any difference betwixt night and day, so no telling how long our debaucheries went on—or where they might lead. I remember riding through the woods, horns calling the hounds to the hunt, chasing a white deer, only the deer became a girl … a frightened human girl.”

He turned to me, his eyes glowing blood red in the firelight, his face pale as ash. “I don’t like to think of what became of that girl, or the others. The queen brought them to me. She said I must learn to feed on their life or I’d no’ be any good to her.” He looked back at the fire, his profile white against the shadows. He was no longer cold, but he was trembling. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but I was afraid that when he looked at me he would see one of those girls he’d hurt. I remembered that after I’d banished Liam to the Borderlands, he spent his time there trying to help creatures across safely, to make amends for the souls he’d drained of life. And when Bill showed up at my door to fix my roof, he constantly told me that he was sorry. I saw now that it wasn’t just for the hurt he’d caused me. He’d been trying to atone for the things he was forced to do to survive in Faerie.