I chuckle. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.” Although Finch would be even more insufferable if he could contact me at all times of day wherever I happened to be. “I’m fairly sure he only gave me the device to annoy me, but it’s come in handy a few times when he needed help in a pinch.”
“Well then, I guess we’d better head back,” she says, giving a rueful look around the house. “I can’t say I’m too sad to be getting out of here.”
Nor am I. The heaviness in the air seems to follow us as we head out of the front door again, not abating until we’re partway up the lane and the manor is out of sight.
Chapter 8
Reva
“You want to know one of my favourite things about you?” Kit drawls at me right before we reach his house. “Your adaptability. Wrong customer, you find a new one. Someone suggests visiting a creepy, old abandoned house? You don’t even consider saying no. Whatever the situation is, you pivot.”
“Am I?” I snort. “I feel like I’ve had to learn to be, springing from place to place, never stopping anywhere for too long.”
Maybe that’s why I’m not losing my mind over the whole mate situation. You learn after a while that there’s no point in fighting the current when it’s got you in its clutches. Things happen around you, and they knock you off course, but it’s up to you to work out how to handle that.
My current technique seems to be distracting myself. If I keep my brain busy enough right now, I can worry about the mate bonds and their consequences later when I’m alone and I’ve got gallons of tea to help me work things through.
Or maybe I’ll go for a swim. Noush’s thoughts always help to ground me in the moment. And I can’t see her being afraid of a couple of mate bonds.
I can imagine the sort of thing she’ll come out with as soon as I slip on my skin.We need a couple of adoring males around to fetch us snacks and tell us our hair looks nice.
By this point, we’re stepping inside Kit’s home once again and there isn’t time for a retort. Even after our brisk walk back, I still haven’t quite shaken the strange sense of unease from being inside the old coven house. Still, I paste on a smile and try to shake it off.
My smile is almost immediately replaced by a confused frown when I catch the scent of cinnamon and bread in the air.
“Frannie? Aster?” We step through the empty living area into the kitchen, where Frannie is sitting and nursing a cup of tea and Aster is at the counter, plucking a fresh loaf of bread from a tray onto a wire rack.
“Your man here’s been busy,” Frannie says with a weary sigh that I don’t think comes from Aster’s decision to bake. “So have I. Up and down I’ve been, like my legs are on a loop to the front door. Seems people don’t know how to read the sign Kit left.”
I can hear Kit speaking softly in the next room and wander further into the kitchen, eyeing Aster’s work.
“Did you sleep enough?” I ask him.
Frannie snorts. “He managed about ten minutes before the influx of idiots at the door.” She takes a long swig of tea and slumps in her chair. “You were gone a while. Did you find anything?”
I meet Aster’s eye as I shake my head, responding in Valmorian. “Nothing. Do you remember anything from the place you were held? Smells or any sounds if you didn’t get a good look of how the place looked?”
He shakes his head in return, holding out one of the cinnamon rolls and waiting for me to take it before reaching for my other hand. We both take a seat at the table, and my teeth sink into the crispy shell of bread and my mouth fills with sweetness and spice.
“All I remember is the damp and the sweat, not much else. I’msorry.”
“Don’t be.” I squeeze his hand. “We didn’t find anything obvious to suggest they were holding you at the coven house, but we didn’t have time to look in every room.”
“I don’t know if I’d recognise it, even if you took me back there.”He gives a visible shudder at the thought and I get to my feet, intent on fetching the blanket from the sofa next door.
“We also had a visit from a guy from the firehouse,” Frannie says. “He stayed for a little while for a chat and offered to show me around.” Her eyes sparkle as she takes a bun for herself. “He even offered to show me his hose.”
I snort, leaning against the doorway. “I bet he did. What happened to being a one-ogre kind of gal?”
“He might not be one of my kind,” she replies without missing a beat. “But I’d be willing to make an exception.” She chews for a moment. “Can you tell your man here that these are delicious?”
I relay the message to Aster, who gives a slight nod, a small smile revealing two dimples as his eyes dart down to rest on the smudge of flour on his sleeve.
“Did your new friend from the firehouse say anything else?” I recall Hilde mentioning something about him knowing whether a complaint had been lodged against the coven house. Although I’m not sure what difference it would make.
“He just said that they hadn’t had any official complaints recently.”
I nod, still unsure how that fits in. Right now, we don’t know if Aster escaped from anywhere close by, or how far he’d travelled before we found him in that alleyway. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to find at the old coven house.
