Page 81 of Woods of the Raven

I was relieved but had to make something clear. “You don’t owe me a thing,” I assured him. “And that was”—I licked my fingers, making both him and Lorne wince—“the most amazing cinnamon roll I’ve ever had in my life.”

“Well, good, and while I’m pleased, might you use the napkin Lorne provided you?”

I wanted to tell him that I was normally the epitome of good manners, it was only that I was a bit hungry this morning. I always was the night after using my power. “It was just so good; I might have gotten a bit carried away.”

“What a lovely compliment,” he said with a sigh.

All his food was amazing, and I told Declan that again, later, as I cleared the table.

“So you think my bistro will be a success?”

“That’s what you call it? Not a bakery and sandwich shop?”

His face showed his disdain for my words. “No. It’s a bistro, an upscale eatery. A sandwich shop? That’s so…plebian. Here, let me help you clean up,” he offered.

“No, you brought everything. I’ll take care of it.”

He smiled as he sipped his coffee that he too, horribly, drank black as well. I didn’t understand that at all.

Lorne was looking through the diary, convinced that the book slipping off the shelf in what we were now calling the library had not been an accident but the cottage speaking to us.

“Now please trust me enough to tell me what you think you’re up against,” Declan pleaded with me. “I would love to help.”

“Well, your friend Rulaine came to visit us last night,” Lorne explained, and Declan gasped, I was guessing, horrified for us.

“Were you scared but at the same time in total awe of how beautiful she was?” Declan asked. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, she’s evil incarnate but looks like one of the consorts of my first mistress, the Lady Islyn.”

“She was beautiful to you?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

I turned to Lorne. “And you?”

“To me, she looked like that actress Cassandra Peterson, when she was playing Elvira, Mistress of the Dark,” he explained. “So yeah, very pretty.”

“Huh.”

“I hesitate to ask what she looked like to you,” Declan said, “but I must know.”

“Honestly, she looked like one of the teachers I had in elementary school that I didn’t necessarily like.”

Lorne asked, “Is that something a sorceress does? Changing like that depending on whom she’s facing?”

“Sorceress?” Declan seemed confused. “Is that what she said?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “She said she was Sorceress Rulaine of Dragon Marsh.”

His brows furrowed.

“No? That’s not what she told you?”

“Well,” Declan said, “keep in mind that she was threatening me at the time. She was in a hurry and snatched me from the winery in Tuscany—which I adored, by the way—and—”

“You could go back, couldn’t you?” Lorne asked him.

“No, this was before the Second World War.”

Lorne took a moment. “Okay, so then she took you from that time, and how long were you in her home before she brought you here?”