Page 63 of Crown of Wings and Whispers

“When you summon us.” She pointed a deadly claw at my arm. “Only you can summon us. And only your touch can turn me corporeal. Without it, I last only minutes. And without you, no other can force their transport. The heavens are closed to all but the DeNoy…and her Kivi.”

There was barely anything left of her by the time she leapt silently into the air. I watched, scanning the dark sky above us for a wisp of colored mist, but she was gone.

But she’d been real.

“Holy shit.”

Griffon collapsed to his butt in the snow, stunned.

I laughed and prodded his back with my knee. “Come on, fearsome one. We need to skin our dinner while there’s still a little light.”

* * *

The airinside the mökki smelled like cold wood, colder ashes, and snow. No faint traces of our meager lunch. Any scent we’d left hanging in the air had frozen and fallen to the floor. I put my gloves on to take the screens from around the fire and store them back behind the kindling box, then wrestled the fattest logs into the firepit, thinking Griffon might be impressed.

He’d insisted on doing the skinning and butchering and sent me inside to get the fire going. I found an apron and dropped it over my head out of habit and was immediately overwhelmed by domestic urges. I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, setting and decorating the table, creating a side dish, and mixing up a boxed cake, which I covered with canned cherries and cooked in a cast iron skillet.

The chances weren’t good that the cake would turn out, but I couldn’t help trying. Like Kivi, I felt like the day’s revelations were worthy of a little celebration.

Griffon blew in at one point, shirtless, when I was up to my arse in dirty dishes. He delivered two raggedy steaks that looked like he’d cut them with a dull hatchet and marched back out again without a word. I assumed, from his lack of eye contact, that the butchering wasn’t going as smoothly as he’d expected. After all, it might have been a hundred years since he’d had to butcher his own kill.

I considered going outside to offer help, but he’d all but had his hat handed to him an hour before by a girl dragon, and I didn’t think his male ego would welcome a witness to his struggles.

Another forty minutes passed before he came through the door again with his shirt on and not a speck of blood in sight. This time, he looked me in the eye and smiled. “Smells heavenly.”

I was suddenly a contestant on a cooking show, facing my only judge with a table covered with questionable dishes. “Try to remember that I poured coffee for a living. I was never allowed in the kitchen.”

He stepped close, lifted my hands to his neck, and wrapped his arms around my waist. “I have never had anything so delicious.” He stared at my lips when he said it, followed by a kiss that curled my toes and my apron strings.

“I’m serious,” I said, pushing him away so I could take off the apron. He moved over to the table, and I took the mystery out of what he saw. “Broccoli and cheese. No idea what kind of cheese it was. And the broccoli was canned, so it’s a little mushy. The bread was kinda stale, so I made garlic toast.”

“Looks perfect.”

“And I didn’t burn the steaks, so that’s something.”

He lifted the tin plate off the top of the big surprise. “You made cake!”

“Yes, well, you have two choices for dessert—slightly burned chocolate cake from the bottom, or undercooked cake on the top covered with cherries.”

“Both, please.” He waved his hand over the candles. “And candlelight.” He tilted his head to the side and looked back at me, past his shoulder, with his lip caught between his teeth. As he looked away, his gaze stuttered on the beds at the back of the room, but he didn’t say anything.

I’d had a hard time keeping my eyes off them myself.

“I’m famished,” he said, his voice so quiet I wondered if he’d intended for me to hear. A shiver ran up my spine and shook me. Again, I suspected he wasn’t talking about food.

We ate in silence for the most part. He’d wink and smile each time he noticed something I’d added to the table—cloth napkins with a sprig of dried lavender tucked in the improvised napkin ring, the plaid ribbon from the artisan bread tied around the candleholder, and the short stems of fresh pine I’d stuck in a ceramic stein for a centerpiece.

Every now and then, one of us would mutter the word dragon and we’d laugh.

“You brought us here,” I said, picking out the edible bits of my slice of cake. “So you must have expected it.”

He shook his head. “If I’m honest, I suspectedyoumight transform into something…formidable. We came to find out what being a DeNoy meant—these creatures that must be eliminated to protect entities we know nothing about. A pity Gloir and Afi didn’t put more detail into The Covenant.”

“Thereismore, though. Afi, the Grandfather, hid three books for Wickham to find.” I told Griffon about the first one, which included the last known whereabouts of those possessing the Naming Powers. “The second and third were supposedly for the Fae King, but that was a lie.” I told him about cutting my hand on the second box and finding nothing besides an old Bible and the note addressed to me, revealing what I was. “The third wouldn’t open, no matter what we tried. If the Fae King is really dead, I assume it can’t be opened ever.”

“Where is this box now?”

“I don’t know. Wickham intended to bury all three of them the morning I left, to be sure Orion couldn’t get his hands on them.” I also told him about the vision Loretta and Lorraine had about their own deaths, that they knew they would die at the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford, and how there is now a second one, erected in the backyard at Hope House. “So naturally, we are expecting that Orion will find the place.”

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