“I brought him a book.” The raven shifter dropped his voice, leaning toward Cathy as though about to reveal a great secret. “He likes books.”
The corner of Cathy’s mouth twitched. “I gathered that.”
“Motley’s responsible for a sizeable proportion of my collection, actually,” Aodhan said, seizing the opportunity to divert the conversation away from his early history. “It’s considerably easier to excavate long-lost grimoires from sealed catacombs when you have someone who can simply stroll through any door. When we had access to Maeve’s sidhean, he was even able to retrieve volumes for me from your world.”
Motley nodded, his chest puffing out with pride. “Slip between realms. In and out and gone, fast and clever, right under the noses of the Wild Hunt. No better thief.”
“I did pay for the books,” Aodhan added hastily, as Cathy’s eyebrows rose. He shot Motley a narrow-eyed glare. “Or at least, I tried to. I’m not entirely convinced someone didn’t keep the jewels for himself.”
Motley adopted an expression of total innocence. “You wanted me to leave the jewels for the humans? Don’t remember you saying that. Must have misheard. Or forgotten. Forget a lot of things, you know.”
“Sometimes quite selectively, I note.”
Cathy let out a breath of laugher. “You two are old friends.”
“Oh, no,” Motley told her earnestly. “Aodhan doesn’t have friends. At least not ones without pages. That’s what he says, anyway. That’s why I bring him books. So he has an excuse to let me visit.”
Aodhan wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Fortunately, they’d reached their destination, forestalling the need for any response.
He held up a hand, stopping in front of two slender silver birch trees with intertwined branches. Over the course of several years, he’d trained the pair of saplings with a combination of magic and wire so that they formed a perfect arch. “Here we are.”
Cathy looked at the trees, then around as though expecting to find something else. “I don’t see any doors.”
Motley’s black eyes gleamed. With a distinct flourish, he reached between the trunks, apparently grasping thin air.
As always, Aodhan missed the moment. No matter how many times he’d watched Motley perform this feat, he’d never managed to pinpoint when the magic occurred. There was no sparkle of light; no invisible surge of power. One instant Motley’s white fingers held nothing—and the next, they curled around a brass handle. The door was simply there, without hinges or frame, suspended in the air.
Cathy’s mouth dropped open. “That’s the door to Tamsin’s kitchen!”
“Cuan and Tamsin said I should only use this one to talk to them. Especially if I was calling unexpectedly.” Motley frowned, looking a little put-out. “I still think they should have been doing that in the bedroom. Not on the sofa. Anyway.”
He turned the handle, opening the door a crack. A bright line of light spilled out, along with a snatch of heated argument.
“—don’t care what the rules are!” a woman was saying in furious, frantic tones. “Maeve’s got Cathy, and we have to rescue her right now!”
“Tamsin,” Cathy breathed.
Aodhan grabbed her shoulder, holding her back as she surged forward. “Stay back. We can see and hear them, but the worlds are too far apart here to allow anyone to step through.”
Cathy stared at the door, homesickness written all over her face. “But they sound so close.”
He tightened his grip, digging his fingers ruthlessly into her shoulder to make her look at him. “It’s only possible to pass through to the human realm at certain places, like Maeve’s sidhean. If you try to go through the door now, you’ll fall into the void between realms. Even I wouldn’t be able to find you. Do not go near it.”
“We don’t have a way to get there,” a different female voice was saying now. This one was calmer, but a hint of a growl edged each word. “Maeve’s hardly going to open the portal to let us into the fae realm. And even if by some miracle we managed to find a different sidhean that was willing to let us cross over, we can’t. The Wild Hunt doesn’t interfere with the unseelie, at least not while they stick to their own lands. If we attacked Maeve in her own sidhean, it would mean war between the worlds.”
“But—”
“Hello, Tamsin,” Motley called, still holding the door so that it was barely ajar. “Are you wearing clothes this time?”
Overlapping exclamations of “Motley!” came from the unseen room, followed by what sounded like at least half a dozen people trying to occupy the same space. Motley opened the door fully, revealing five anxious faces.
Two of them Aodhan recognized straight away—Cuan, of course, and his mate Tamsin. Aodhan had only met Tamsin on a handful of occasions, but the curvy, energetic woman was not the sort of person one forgot in a hurry. She was just as fiery and ferocious as the last time he’d seen her.
Cuan was also the same, and yet also… not. In all the time that Aodhan had known him, the half-breed had always had a tight, guarded look—which was understandable, given his previous role as Lady Maeve’s huntsman and general whipping boy. Now, however, there was a new softness around his eyes, an easing of that constant vigilance. Exiled from Maeve’s court, he’d finally found his true home.
The other three were unknown to him. One—a tall woman with short, tight-curled hair and midnight skin—he could instantly tell wasn’t fully human. Balefire flickered deep in her dark eyes, betraying her true nature. If she wasn’t a hellhound shifter, Aodhan would eat his own wand.
The final pair were human, and both female, and those were the sole points of commonality between them. The first was all sharp edges and scowls, and immediately fixed him with a deeply skeptical glare. The second, in contrast, was plump and round, with trusting blue eyes and a halo of blonde curls. The instant she saw Cathy, she let out a squeal that probably stunned every bat for a seven league radius.