Andor set his packages down and turned to survey the room. Small and modest, the living room/dining room combination reflected Claire’s muted tastes. The colors, the lighting and the furniture gave a sense of peace and calm, along with an unspoken invitation to have a seat, prop your feet up and stay for a while. Even the music, played low, and piped softly through speakers against one wall added to the home’s cozyambience.
Claire’s gaze rested heavily on him. “Welcome to the manor. Not grand, but it’shome.”
He’d lived in soaring palaces built of starlight and gemstones, where moonbeams striking the water spilling from fountains resonated like the chime of exquisitely tuned bells. He preferred this. “I like it. It feels like a sanctuary from a hardday.”
Her entire demeanor eased, and her wide smile deepened the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes. “Thanks. That’s a lovely thing to say.” She gazed at him a moment longer before giving a start. “I’ll get Jake. I told him we were having company tonight.” She disappeared for a moment into a short hallway, returning with a young boy who clutched a tablet in onehand.
Dark-haired where his mother was blonde, Jake had inherited her refined bone structure and arched eyebrows. His gaze was focused on the tablet screen, and he didn’t look up when Claire nudged him closer to Andor. “Jake, this is my friend Andor. Sayhello.”
“He-wo.” Jake’s gaze flickered briefly to his mother, but he still didn’t look at Andor, and his greeting sounded ...young, the vowels broad and the consonants blunt as if spoken by a toddler instead of a ten-year-old.
Andor crouched down to eye level with the boy. He didn’t hold out his hand to shake, suspecting he’d get no response. “Good to meet you, Jake. I work with your mom at the museum. She’s amazing, but I bet you already know that.” He glanced at Claire, whose cheeks had gone rosy at his compliment, andwinked.
She patted Jake on the back. “Go sit at the table, please. We’re about to eat.” He did as she instructed without protest or any verbal response at all. Claire’s eyes were shadowed, the wariness returned full force in both her gaze and her posture as she turned to Andor. “Jake’s autistic,” she said softly. “So don’t be too weirded out if he does odd things at the table while we’re eating. You’re a stranger, and having someone over for dinner who isn’t the babysitter is out of routine. He might actout.”
Andor watched Jake sing to himself, a wordless tune. The boy rocked in his chair, occasionally flicking the back of his neck with his fingers. “This is why he couldn’t go out withus?”
“Yeah. I don’t keep him trapped at home all the time, but a loud, crowded restaurant on a Friday night would be a nightmare of overstimulation for him. See how he’s snapping his fingers against his neck? That’s stimming behavior, a coping mechanism he uses when something is out of theordinary.”
The fabric of her blouse was smooth across his fingertips where he touched her elbow. “He’s a lot more polite about it than I would be. Usually by the end of dinner in a noisy restaurant, I’m ready to stab someone with my fork.” Andor winked at Claire once more. “Yours is a better idea. Nicer place, better music, great food, and I won’t have to shout at you across the table to be heard. And I was able to meet yourson.”
She eyed him speculatively. “Are you sure you’re not apsychopath?”
He laughed. “Stabbing someone with a fork in an eating establishment would get me not only jail time but probably a mental health evaluation. That being said, I can assure you I’mharmless.”
That wasn’t true in many contexts, but Claire was infinitely safe with him. He protected what he cherished. The thought brought him up short. How had this woman—once a child blessed with magic now lost—embedded herself so quickly and so deeply into hissoul?
Something of that breath-stealing realization must have revealed itself in his expression. Claire’s eyes widened. “Hey, you okay? You just wentpale.”
He nodded, still trying to recapture his mental footing. “I’m fine. Just hungry. We should eat. Passing out on your floor isn’t how I want either of us to remember our first dinnertogether.”
Dinner started out as an exercise in endurance. At first tense, nervous and obviously resigned to the idea Andor would bolt for the door the second her son did something odd, Claire had given lengthy explanations for everything from why Jake could synchronize two separate videos on his tablet to play the exact thing at the same time but couldn’t easily handle a fork to eat to how he used a particular program to help himcommunicate.
“He’s echolaic too,” she explained. “So if you say something, and he repeats a portion back to you, it isn’tmockery.”
Andor laid his hand over hers, feeling the twitch of her slender fingers against his palm. “Claire. Relax. I’m not a therapist; this isn’t an interview for either you or Jake. It’s just dinner. He’s fine. I’m fine, but I’ll take another beer if you have anextra.”
It was a not-so-subtle ploy, but she grasped it like a drowning person clutching a lifeline. “Of course! I’ll be rightback.”
The kitchen was no more than five steps from the dining area and separated by a wall, but Andor guessed a few seconds away from the table would give her a little time to breathe. He glanced at Jake whose fingers flew over the tablet’s screen, opening videos and games and closing them just as fast, as if the brief flashes of pictures they presented were far more entertaining than the content in itsentirety.
“Jake, can I hear that song you played earlier from the twovideos?”
Jake didn’t look up, but his fingers danced across the screen, opening up files faster than Andor could track. Soon the two videos played together in perfectsynchronization.
“Well done, child.” Andor toasted him with his empty bottle. His heart stuttered in his chest when Jake suddenly looked up to meet his gaze. His face, still soft and rounded with youth, grew animated for a moment. “Elf,” he said. His eyes returned to his tablet as if Andor had suddenly winked out ofexistence.
Andor gawked at Jake for a moment before breaking into a grin wide enough to squint his eyes shut. Claire had passed her gift of the deep sight on to her child. Jake, who didn’t speak or hold a fork easily, could see the ljósálfar elf sitting at his mother’stable.
Ah, Nicholas, he thought. Did you ever meet this boy on ChristmasEve?
Claire returned to the table, two bottles in her hand, her equilibrium restored. She gave him and Jake a puzzled look. “What were you two up to while I was in thekitchen?”
Andor clinked his beer against hers. “Plans to conquer the world. Jake will be mygeneral.”
The remainder of dinner was a far more lighthearted affair. Claire told stories about the Carmichael and some of the exhibit catastrophes that had turned the museum director’s hair prematurely white. “I keep waiting for some of the exhibits to come alive at night, like in those films. I’m just afraid our security team would shoot first and ask questionslater.”
Andor regaled her with tales of his travels. His only permanent point of place, where he was required to appear annually, existed in another realm. When he wasn’t at Nicholas’s service, he lived a mostly nomadic existence in Midgard and had traveled its length and breadth many times over. Claire listened wide-eyed as he described the places he had visited for days or weeks, sometimes a month or two before movingon.
