The cauldron effect, p.70
The Cauldron Effect, page 70
DEWER AWOKE TO FIND himself within kissing distance of the delectable Grace Adair, in time to see her withdraw her finger from her full lips. His heart was thundering and it took him a moment to realize why. It wasn’t their close proximity, but that his clasp on Miss Adair’s knee was – its own accord –inching upward. He swiftly removed his recalcitrant hand and promptly lost his balance, falling forward over her until his face was planted squarely over her soft bosom.
“My apologies,” he muttered into her wonderfully rose-scented flesh. Mortified at so flagrant a violation of her person, he rapidly distanced himself. The boat tipped backward along with him and he would have fallen overboard if she had not wrapped her arms around his midriff and hugged him closer.
“Careful!” she said.
“Hold on, we are entering the Thames,” the water goddess said. Their dorey’s speed increased and they were swept into the faster moving river.
By the time the vessel settled into a steady flow in a vastly more populated waterway, Dewer was sitting on the bottom of the boat with a sexy witch on his lap, making him wish they were alone in a bedroom under warm sheets.
A wave of cold water came over the side and drenched the two of them.
“Sorry,” the water goddess said. Her mischievous grin suggested the splash had been well-aimed and perfectly timed.
Still, it was a drenching he desperately needed. He bit back an oath and mouthed a Thank you to the water goddess.
Miss Adair disappeared from within his arms and the weight of the boat tilted backwards. Then from behind, she said, “I am so glad you are awake, sir.”
He turned to discover her seated a respectable three rows behind, looking dry and properly covered in a fresh new cornflower-blue pelisse that draped her from head to toe. Or it would have been respectable if the top half were not so tight it looked like a second skin, delineating her every delectable curve. The lady might be proper, but she was not shy.
With a flick of his hands he dried himself and his clothing, and then searched for his staff. No sooner did he think about Kemp than it appeared in his hand. It felt different though, lighter, smoother in appearance as if it had lain underwater for a couple of centuries. “What happened to this?”
“Your staff?” Miss Adair asked. “Why, nothing. It was you we were worried about since you have been unconscious for the past twenty-four hours.”
Dewer digested that troublesome news while he turned his alder staff around and noted new markings along its surface. The curves and vines looked oddly familiar, and then he recalled the branding Llyn had given him. These lines were a perfect match to the designs now adorning his right forearm. An arm that no longer pained him as if the water god were trying to dismember Dewer. That foul experience had felt akin to Adramelech’s pets’ stings.
“Perhaps whatever the water god did to you, transferred to your staff?” Miss Adair said with a frown.
Dewer glanced at the water goddess for confirmation but that lady simply shrugged. “I do not know what my father did to you or your staff, sir. Both my brother and I have tried to contact him to inquire about his intentions but he refuses to answer.” She pointed to Dewer’s right arm. “I have also tried to remove my link to you, but the markings now appear permanent and no longer just of my making. I am so sorry for the trouble I and my family have imposed on you.”
“Is this what you two were discussing when I awoke?” he asked, remembering Miss Adair’s forefinger pressed to her oh-so-kissable lips.
At the resultant silence, he glanced from one female to the next. Miss Adair refused to meet his gaze and the water goddess looked tight-lipped and guilty. With a heavy sigh, he shifted to sit with his back to the side so he could gain a clearer view of the two ladies.
“Trust is a difficult commodity,” Dewer said in a soft tone that belied his dread that history was repeating itself. “In fact, I doubt anyone of my acquaintance fully trusts me. Not my mother. Not even my servants, Peter and Jack, even though we have known each other since we were children and they are unquestionably loyal to me.” Definitely not Merryn Pendraven. Not after his mother stole and killed the Coven Protectress’s brother in a bid to nip Dewer’s burgeoning fascination with the young witch. Merryn’s parents even died trying to protect their boy. His mother’s malicious and thoughtless acts had transformed his faint fascination with Merryn into an obsession, to the detriment of all three of them.
He shook off that sad episode from his young life and speared Miss Adair with a grim look, daring her to be different than everyone else in his life.
Fact: Chasing after someone who did not wish to be caught was a colossal waste of time and energy.
Which brought up the elusive question: did Miss Adair wish to be caught, or was her flirting simply as a game? “I trust you, Miss Adair. Will you show me the same courtesy?”
A faint blush spread across her beautiful cheeks and she pressed her lips tight as if afraid to speak. The silence drew on.
“You need help,” the water goddess said in a gentle voice. “If you mean to do as you say, who better than Mr. Dewer to assist you?”
She was planning something foolhardy. Dewer’s heart squeezed in terror that this young witch was about to get herself killed and he would not be there to save her. He wanted to shout, I will watch your back, just give me a chance, but the words clogged his throat like roiling serpents.
Trust me!
The silence in the dorey stretched so tautly, it vibrated.
Disappointed leached into Dewer. It shocked him how badly he had wanted her to rely on him. To want him. Why?
Instantly, Farfur appeared in his mind’s eye, wagging his tail and gazing at Miss Adair like a love-sick puppy instead of the full-grown lethal hellhound that he was.
Where have you been? Dewer snapped silently, realizing that he had missed the hound.
Farfur looked back toward him but his searching glance skimmed blindly past Dewer before returning his attention to Miss Adair. Then with a soft confused whine, he vanished.
Fear overtook Dewer’s regret about Miss Adair’s distrust, as pieces of this puzzle fit into place. His memory loss about events after the water god’s attack. Kemp appearing physically changed. Farfur not seeing him. The latter hurt as if Dewer’s arm had indeed been sliced off. Yet, the hound had come looking for him. He and Farfur must still be tied, but something interfered with their connection.
Dewer was about to call the hound again when Miss Adair distracted him by raising her beautiful slim arms high above her head. A glowing sheet rose from the water, scattering droplets as it sealed into a dome overhead, cocooning their boat and the eel swimming beside them from the outside world.
She met his worried gaze with worry. “No one can be privy to what we are about to discuss, sir, not my family or yours. You cannot share any of what we are about to discuss with your mother.”
“My mother is not my keeper.” Dewer said, but a delighted smile built in his gut that she was about to confide in him. She was unique after all. If she were still sitting on his lap, he would have kissed her. That reminded him of another odd piece of this day’s puzzle. When he awoke, his hand had been inching up Miss Adair’s leg.
Though he certainly wished to explore her delectable body, he would never presume to do so without her permission. If not his, then whose intention had prompted his hand to caress her knee, and then skim upward? Like Kemp and Farfur, was he, too, not entirely himself? If he were not, then perhaps Miss Adair was right to hesitate in placing her trust in him.
When she would have spoken, he raised a hand in warning. “We may not be alone.”
“No one can hear us from outside my shield,” she said.
“Unless he is already within it.”
“What do you mean?” the water goddess asked sounding worried as she glanced around the dome.
“I suspect your father,” —the letch— “might be lodged inside me.”
“That is why you felt so heavy!” Miss Adair said and then blushed becomingly. “I was probing you, sir, to discover what ailed you and felt an unaccountable bulk to your substance.”
“Llyr only told me about the arm-binding to communicate with another, not about moving right into a person like a hermit crab.” The water goddess sounded impressed.
“We must know for certain,” Miss Adair rubbed a hand along her right knee as if she, too, remembered that bold touch. “Mr. Dewer, see if you can communicate with the water god. If he is inside you, ask him his purpose in attaching himself like this.”
First a hellhound and now a water god breezed into him as if he were an open tavern? The idea was entirely unacceptable. Dewer prided himself on his independence. He had fought his whole life to build an inviolable spaced around himself, especially from his mother’s incursions. While he might make an exception for Farfur’s intrusion, the water god must go.
Besides, how could he ever hope to touch Miss Adair again if he could never be sure he was the one doing the stroking? He refused to facilitate another man, or god, to lay intimate hands on his lady. That thought set him back. He gave Miss Adair a quick side glance, and realized that in his heart, he had already claimed her. It was a startling discovery. It meant he was no longer alone. Gentle warmth infused him and was just as quickly doused with an icy reminder of the challenges facing them.
His mother would definitely try to kill Grace. Grace, he savored the name like a sweet, delicious comfit. She could never enter his home in the underworld, for she would not survive there for an instant. Then his current problem reared; the water god was a squatter inside him. Any romantic development he wished to pursue with Grace must remain on hold until he was entirely himself. The restriction irked so much he instantly shut his eyes and went water-god hunting. “I shall return shortly.”
“Be firm,” Miss Adair advised.
“But kind,” the water goddess added.
Dewer ignored them both as he sought out his center and found it water logged, proving the miscreant was indeed trespassing.
Chapter 10
Bartos lay flat on the wet pavement outside the Adairs’ Mayfair townhouse trying to ignore the pattering rain. It had been drizzling all day. After travelling for miles, he was soaked and famished.
Since their master left them to guard the two witches, Dewer’s mother, the dark fae queen, had been giving the two hellhounds nasty looks, as if she sensed they preferred her son’s rule to hers. Every time the elder Witch-Who-Teases fed them, as soon as she looked away, the queen would vindictively whisk away their food. Bartos suspected that she was trying to break their loyalty to Dewer.
Returning to her service was the last thing Bartos wanted. He was actually at a loose end. He no longer felt a compulsion to serve Dewer or the queen. He only obeyed his old master because the Witch-Who-Heals seemed to want him to do so. Bartos had been pondering for days what he had done to displease her enough to make her give him away.
Farfur, on the other hand, was firmly bonded to Dewer. He now sat as still as a statue beside Bartos as he once again tried to contact their master. Then his friend’s eyes snapped open, red pupils glowing with grave concern. “He is not there!”
Tethered to a railing nearby, Ifan, who used to be a hare before Dewer needed a horse, stomped a front hoof. “Are you sure?” he asked, proving he was still, indeed, hare-brained.
This scene was like a reoccurring nightmare. Farfur always came awake with the same bad news, and idiot Ifan would respond with a variation of the same inane question.
Bartos sat up and waited for the inevitable argument to surge between these two combatants.
“Of course, I am sure,” Farfur said. “I would know my master anywhere!”
“Apparently not,” Ifan said. “Else you would not have lost track of him.”
“Let the lad be, Ifan.” Bartos gave Farfur a sympathetic glance. His young friend had not slept in days. “He is unhappy enough as it is.”
“We all want to find our master,” Ifan said, in a conciliatory tone and then ruined it with, “only Farfur kept saying he was especially close to Dewer.” Ifan gave a snort and flicked his tail, showing his lingering jealousy at Farfur’s special bond with their master.
“I am close to him,” Farfur said. “Dewer talks to me all the time.”
Ifan opened his mouth and Bartos growled.
The horse sidled sideways as far as his reins would allow and shut his mouth, for all of one minute. “Where could he be? I thought he wanted to come to London.”
“Probably distracted by the mistress,” Bartos said. He missed her, too. She always fed him on schedule and petted him as she fell asleep each night. He might get laughed at in the underworld – that a hellhound could crave such pampering – but Bartos didn’t care. He was older than any other of his kind and he was ready to retire from life’s trials.
“Something must be wrong,” Farfur said, just as a hackney rolled up in front of the townhouse. The carriage door opened and a wizened old man jumped down from the top and then pulled out the steps.
Bartos’s nose signaled the identity of the passenger before the human’s polished hessians ever touched the first step. Bartos was instantly down the street and around the corner, with Farfur hot on his heels. Hidden behind the wall of a building, they silently peered around the corner toward the Adair townhouse.
“What is he doing here?” Farfur whispered, as the church guard who had once almost killed Bartos descended to the pavement. His holy broadsword was strapped to his back and his green cloak of office fluttered in the breeze as he walked over to pet the tethered horse.
Ifan gave a neigh of pleasure and then turned to shout toward the two hellhounds, “Oy! Why are you two hiding?”
“Shut up!” Bartos growled low in his throat.
“You should have let me eat that foolish hare for breakfast,” Farfur said.
“I wish I had.” At this moment, incurring his master’s displeasure for attacking his horse was preferable to that guard finishing what he began at Dewer’s black tower. Even if he only wounded Bartos again instead of killing him, the Witch-Who-Heals was unlikely to waste any more of her life tending Bartos. He knew from experience that the torture of a holy wound was worse than death.
The guard’s wizardly manservant ran up the steps and knocked on the Adairs’ front door.
Once the two humans were admitted inside the townhouse, Bartos and Farfur slunk back to Ifan’s side. While Farfur stood watch for the return of the church guard, Bartos quickly tugged at the horse’s reins until it came loose and then he led Ifan away.
“Where are we going?” Ifan asked in an excited tone, his hooves striking the pavement in a musical trot.
“As far from that church guard as we can get,” Bartos mumbled past the reins. His back trembled as if that sword had just sliced into him. He wasn’t sure why he was saving the horse, too, but ever since they arrived in London, he’d begun to care about the welfare of the stupid hare-turned-horse.
“We are going to find Dewer,” Farfur said, suddenly looking as chipper as Ifan. “The master just spoke to me. He wants all three of us to come to him. We must hurry, and Ifan, you will stop talking!”
DEWER’S MOVEMENTS BECAME lethargic as if he were traversing through deep water. As he maneuvered forward, memories assaulted him, from his imprisonment at Adramelech’s hands and then farther back to his childhood in his mother’s underworld kingdom. The water god seemed to be rifling through Dewer’s past in search of something. His pulse shot up, fear crowding close that the water god might stumble across Dewer’s secret longing.
He arrived at his memories of his home in Black Mountain, but this dark tower was from the past, when his father lived there. He fumed at his laborious pace in entering the library. Inside, the water god lounged on Dewer’s father’s chair, a goblet of wine held in one tentacle while several other limbs were flung carelessly over the chair arms.
“Get out!” Dewer said.
“This is what you are after,” the water god mused. “You intend to find your father’s killer and make him pay. A noble, if foolish, goal.”
Dewer shot a bolt of energy straight at the intruder. The chair erupted in flames. When the inferno died down, the chair was charred and a hole in its center showed straight through to the wall of books behind it.
“Temper, temper,” the water god said from high up behind him.
He swung around in frustratingly slow motion, fuming at having missed his target.
The water god was sitting on a high bookshelf, blue tentacles spread out.
Dewer itched to send a second bolt upward. He clenched his fist instead, conserving his strength. “What do you want?”
“Every boy needs a father figure in his life,” the water god said, one of his tentacles thoughtfully tapping the top of the shelf.
“If you are applying for the role, it is already taken.”
The water god chuckled. “By your mother? Or Adramelech? He craves that role, if only to impress the queen.”
“My father may not be here in person, but I remember him quite clearly. I need no substitute.”
“Your father died when you were five, Dewer. No matter how much you cling to his fading memory, he cannot advise you on how to dress to impress the ladies, when to open your heart to a lover or why sometimes it is important to accept defeat.”
Dewer flicked his hand in dismissal, thinking about his recent pain. “I have learned all of those lessons by myself. You are one to talk. Rumor has it that you indentured your son to a druid for centuries. You were not exactly present for him, were you?”
“His punishment taught him how to become self-sufficient,” the water god snapped, showing the first sign of a flare up. “If I die soon, that lesson will prove to be vital for the lad. That brings me to why I am here. You will soon be called upon to face your greatest challenge and I have been requested to offer my services. If not as a father substitute, then perhaps you will accept me as a mentor? Warlocks value that sort of relationship, do they not?”
