Bridget had waited until the money had landed in her account and then got the fuck out of London, where none of George’s meddling friends or fake church members could get to her. She had moved to Dublin and never regretted it, not even when the ancient goddess Morrigan had run havoc in the streets. She knew the fae would stop her, and they had.
Bridget didn’t worry about the infant brother the fae had taken either. In her opinion, the fae had saved him as much as her. He was better off with the fae who would cherish him as child-wealth and raise him better than his asshole father and gold-digging mother would have.
“No dwelling,” Bridget said out loud to herself and climbed out of bed. She wasn’t that beaten-down girl anymore.
Bridget walked through her flat’s tiny kitchen and brewed herself a strong coffee. She needed to get to work soon, but considering work was downstairs, she didn’t hurry.
Her apartment never failed to cheer her up. Piles of books sat on every surface, and a punching bag dummy of a man’s head and torso stood in one corner.
One of the first things she did when she moved to Dublin was take self-defense classes, Krav Maga and MMA. It had been better than talk therapy to get out her pent-up feelings of helpless rage that sometimes overtook her.
She still had phases where she couldn’t tolerate being around people too much. Dating was a farce at the best of times. She liked being alone with her books, and a lot of those were about consciousness, astral projection, and just about everything else to do with the mind.
When George the fuckwit had been beating her, she had always let her mind take her somewhere else. She had been dissociating for as long as she could remember. Her last therapist had told her that it was a trauma response, but Bridget loved being able to slip into the worlds in her head.
That was why she had always loved reading. They were like visiting other people’s mind palaces. Now, she had someone visiting hers and wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
“What if Bas of the hot accent is right, and it’s in the astral plane?” she asked out loud. She had a bad habit of talking to herself, but she had no one else to talk to about the random guy who had turned up again.
She knew a few facts about him: the sexy accent was Irish; his name was Basset; he was tall with a great set of shoulders, and he knew all about astral projection.
He wasn’t someone Bridget had made up. He had felt tooreal. He was weirdly familiar, like she had met him before but didn’t know where. He could also turn into a dragon.
Bridget snorted and stirred sugar into her coffee. Turning into a dragon was a bit extra. She chose a hawk because it was smaller, and she was drawn to it because of the surname she had chosen when she had left England. A dragon form would have taken an immense amount of mental energy to create.
What a show-off. Bridget wondered if Bas would turn up again or if she should invade his space and see how he liked it. He had said something about wards, but she didn’t know what he was talking about. She had never felt unsafe in her own mind, and she didn’t know how to use magic.
The coffee caught in her throat as she remembered the dark shadow man that had come into her mind library. Basset had gone full dragon before she had been sucked into her nightmare. He had acted like they were being attacked. Were they?
Bridget was still brooding as she went downstairs twenty minutes later, unlocked the door, and turned the open sign of‘Whitmore’s Book Exchange.’It was a gorgeous old store with a historical front of glass and stone. Inside were antique chandeliers, Tiffany lamps, velvet chaise lounges, and shelves upon shelves of dark oak. Everything was warm, cozy, and smelled of rose incense and paper.
Bridget had been there so often in her first weeks in Dublin that the elderly owner, Marge Whitmore, had offered her a job and the empty flat upstairs. It was a good deal that kept both women happy.
Bridget hadn’t had a job up until that point, but she knew all about books, so she wasn’t qualified for much else. She had plenty of money in high-interest savings, and she could live off the retail wage easily. The biggest perk was that she could read when there weren’t any customers. Bridget thought it was the best job in the world.
Today’s reading time would become her thinking time because Bridget didn’t like nerdy strangers strolling about in her head, no matter how hot they were. Bas, the Stranger, was worse than hot. He was smart and intriguing. Bridget never met a mystery in her mind she didn’t want to solve. Only this time, the mystery was a man.
“First time for everything,” she muttered to herself. She turned on the shop’s laptop and got busy deep diving ‘what to do when you meet someone in the astral plane’ and hoped she found something useful.
3
Bas wasn’t the type of person to pout when things didn’t go his way, but he definitely was pouting at being interrupted talking to Hawk Girl.
He had prowled around the Greatdrakes mansion like an irritated tiger in a cage until he finally gave in and went to the kitchen. It was the one place that soothed his bad moods and kept his hands busy. He liked cooking when working on a problem. Kneading bread helped him think.
Bas was working on a sourdough when Valentine came in and plopped down at the counter. He didn’t look like he had been sleeping. Fresh ink and blood were smeared on his forearm, and his usually slicked-back dark hair was in disarray.
“Gods, what have you done to yourself now?” Bas chided before wetting down a clean kitchen towel and wrapping Valentine’s arm with it.
“Didn’t notice I was bleeding. Is there food?” Valentine answered wearily.
“I’ll make you some. When was the last time you slept properly?” Bas asked. He pulled out leftover roast chicken fromthe night before and other ingredients before starting to fix his brother’s sandwich.
Valentine had stayed with the elves for a few weeks over midsummer to learn how their ink shamans bound magic into their tattoos. When he had returned, he had been touching up and renewing different sigils on his own body to incorporate his new knowledge. Bas had no idea what all of Valentine’s tattoos meant, and he doubted his brother would tell him. Valentine was private in that way.
Valentine rested his chin in his hand. “What day is it?”
“You’re asking me?” Bas and his brothers were good at many things but, like all magicians, absolutely hopeless at keeping track of time. Bas, more than most, lived outside of time.
