“It’s a lava lamp,” I said in a tone that would brook no argument. “It’s going in the bedroom.”
“I see.” Victoria’s voice indicated she did not, in fact, see.
“It provides ambient illumination,” Bo said loyally.
“It provides nothing,” Ellie argued. “The wax hasn’t moved since 2019.”
I tucked the lamp under my arm with a scowl and that was the end of that.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of unpacking, rearranging, and intermittent Ellie breakdowns. Samuel reappeared once the crying had subsided to a manageable level and helped me organize the closet. Bernard produced sandwiches and tea. Mrs. Chen asked Nora how she made her towels smell so fresh.
By late afternoon, I’d fully settled in. The bedroom Samuel and I now shared smelled like his cedar cologne and my vanilla shampoo, which shouldn’t have worked but somehow did. The lava lamp sat on the nightstand. The wax had not moved.
Bo was asleep on a dog bed the size of a small country that Victoria had sourced from somewhere. He’d looked obscenely content when it had arrived and had made it his duty to point out to Pearl that his bed wasbigger than hers.
“Happy?” Samuel asked, pulling me against his chest as we stood in the doorway.
I leaned into him and smiled. “Yeah. I am.”
His wolf pressed warmly against mine through the bond.
The Maple Street clinic reopened two days later. It was the last one of the Lincoln sisters’ health care centers to resume business.
Didi texted me a photograph of the queue stretching around the block. Brownies, dwarves, fae, and assorted supernatural residents were lined up outside the familiar blue awning, many of them carrying baked goods and flowers for the Lincoln sisters.
Amberford was finally settling back into something resembling normal. The Forgetting spells Esmeralda had cast across town had begun to fade. Daria had assigned the Ashgrove coven to monitor the Thornwick property while the ley lines recovered. Oscar had been put in charge of filing the official report on the Lincoln sisters’ kidnapping, a task he’d accepted with the enthusiasm of someone who’d been handed a root canal.
Which left the matter of the black cat’s fate.
Victoria, Samuel, Pearl, Bo, and I pulled up to Barney’s mansion on a crisp Saturday afternoon a week after the emergency Alliance meeting. The brass door knocker had new googly eyes on it. Nobody commented on them.
Barney answered the door in his usual pristineattire. There were four parallel scratches on his left forearm.
Pearl swished her tail. “Those look fresh.”
“They are,” the vampire said sullenly. “Before anyone says anything, I want it on record that what you’re about to see and hear was not my idea.”
We exchanged puzzled glances.
“Noted,” Samuel said. “How’s your new ward?”
Barney’s jaw tightened in a way that conveyed several paragraphs of suffering. “She’s peachy.”
He stepped aside and let us in.
Harold materialized in the hallway, the butler’s composure firmly intact despite a small bandage on one finger.
“Welcome back,” he greeted us. “Shall I fetch the tea service?”
“Please,” Victoria said. She glanced at the claw marks on Barney’s arm. “And maybe a first aid kit for your master.”
Harold’s smile didn’t waver. “Already prepared, ma’am.”
We followed Barney down the familiar hallway lined with oil paintings. A framed portrait that I didn’t remember seeing before hung near the drawing room. It was a photograph of a black cat wearing a pink bow, set inside an ornate gilded frame.
I slowed. “Wait. Is that?—”
“Don’t,” Barney said darkly.
