And most of the time, it worked. But not tonight. “It’s tables or dishes, Claire. One or the other.”
She sighed suddenly, and gave up. Too tired to argue, probably. “Tables, then. No need for both of us to get soaked.”
But Louis-Cesare didn’t like that idea. “I will do it, if you will rest,” he told me.
Claire blinked at him, as if she must have heard wrong, and I laughed. “You will do it?”
“Why not?”
I licked my lips, so very, very many comments warring to be the first one out. But Claire looked him over critically. Of course, he wasn’t dressed for housework.
He was wearing the same khaki trousers and blue sweater as this afternoon. He wore sweaters a lot; I didn’t know why. Vampires could regulate their temperature a lot better than humans, but a sweater in August looked strange. I guessed maybe he liked the way it felt against his skin.
It was understandable. The fabric—some kind of ungodly soft angora—just enhanced the hard muscle below, and proved almost impossible not to touch. I didn’t even realize I’d been doing it until I felt a nipple harden abruptly under my hand.
And until a dishcloth hit me in the face.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Claire told me drily. “You’re on kitchen duty.”
“Why?”
“You need to cool off.”
“I’m fine,” I said, feeling my cheeks heat, and tossed the towel back.
“Of course you are,” she said, rolling her eyes. But then she left us to it.
The back of the house is one of the reasons the old place is preferable to any slick new apartment. Yes, the water had to run for ten minutes to get remotely close to hot. Yes, half the outlets would shock the hell out of you if you did anything so radical as try to plug anything in. Yes, the garden gate screamed like a murder victim at the slightest touch.
But then there was this.
It was a relic from a time when people actually used backyards for things like hanging up laundry and planting a garden and, hell, playing major-league baseball, given the size. But then the fey had moved in. The front of the house had had to remain the same, since it faced the street and people might have wondered had it suddenly turned into a literal fairyland. But the back was fenced and fairly private, and the fey had been bored and…well.
The old fence had been close to falling down, with rotten and/or missing boards and choked with weeds. But now the weeds had been replaced by vines that had braided themselves together, filling holes and then flowing along the old boards like waves. The illusion was heightened by sprays of some kind of white flower that foamed up here and there, like breaking water.
There were more flowers dotting the yard, despite the fact that most of them weren’t in season. One of those that was, the neighbor’s purple hydrangeas, had really gotten into the spirit of things. The usually sickly-looking bush had all but burst out of the ground, cascading over the fence like a waterfall and forming a waving purple puddle along one side of the yard.
In the middle of it all a miniature city had sprung up, a half circle of vaguely medieval-looking tents splashed with gold by the chains of lanterns strung between them. A bunch of huge roots had pushed up from the ground in the center, making a sitting area around a fire pit, where the artists and the fey were talking and singing and laughing and apparently getting along like gangbusters. Of course, that might have had something to do with the aforementioned cloud of weed.
That wouldn’t affect the fey, who were pretty much i
mmune to weak old human plants. But it ensured that their guests didn’t notice certain things. Like the nearby patch of not-bluebells, which chimed with a faint tune whenever the breeze rustled through them. Or the strings of fireflies that festooned the bushes and sparkled in the trees, like tiny Christmas lights. Or the old lawn table and chairs that were living up to the name, having been completely covered, down to the individual slats in the seats, by a fuzzy blanket of bright green moss.
It was beautiful and weird and kind of disturbing and—
“Enchanting,” Louis-Cesare said, looking around as we approached three new picnic tables set up halfway between the house and the camp.
“Yeah, literally,” I said, plopping the tray on the end of the nearest table and shaking out the trash bag folded inside.
The tables sat six each, which was normally plenty, even when family and fey all ate together. But tonight there had been more people than usual, and mismatched chairs, extra place settings and visitors’ casserole dishes littered the area, making cleanup more of a job than usual. I closed up a couple folding chairs and stacked them against a tree, and then turned to table number one, only to have Louis-Cesare take the first plate out of my hand.
“I said I would do that.”
“Except we need our dishes in one piece,” I said, taking it back. “Thanks.”
“You think I do not know how?” he asked, and the dreaded eyebrow of doom went north.
“I think you do not know how,” I agreed.