Lucy looked up into his intense blue eyes. His hand was warm and strong on hers.
Maybe itwaspossible, she thought. If there was bad magic in the world—if men could turn into tigers and attack her—maybe there was good magic as well. She wasn't sure if she believed in it, but Eren wasn't afraid; that much she could see.
All right,she thought. She would tell him everything—eventually. But first, she thought that after everything that had happened to her, she had earned one nice day out, without the shadow of danger and misery hanging over it.
"Then let's have that tour," she said, smiling up at him.
Eren broke into a grin so warm and engaging that it took her breath away. "Where would you like to start? Maybe a fancy coffee? Or a bookstore?"
"I didn't think you'd have either one of those things here!"
"We do," he said. "Heddy's has the best coffee I've ever had anywhere, and the bookstore just opened last year."
"Coffee," she decided. "Then books. No wait. Books, then coffee? Or ..."
This might just be the best day of her life yet.
EREN
Eren hadn't realizedhow subdued Lucy was when he first met her until he truly began to see her happy. As she blossomed and came alive, he saw that she was the sort of person whose joy could fill an entire room. She was like a human ray of sunshine, and he began to realize that he could happily spend the entire rest of his life just finding things to give her to make her beam at him like that.
He wasn't sure he had ever felt his bear so quiet and calm. It had been restless and uncontrollable for his entire life, even before everything that had happened after he left home in the Army. But when Lucy was present, it seemed as if his bear was happy to settle down and bask in her presence.
Is this what contentment feels like? Peace?
Is this what having a mate means?
His bear still had no clear answer for that, and Eren was starting to realize that in order to get an answer, he was going to have to tune in to his bear in a way that he had long ago trained himself not to do. In order to control his uncontrollable animal, he had to hold it at a distance, apart from himself. But in the ease that came with Lucy's presence, he felt closer to his bear than he had for his entire life. He no longer had to struggle to keep its urges to snap and bite and attack from intruding on the human side of his life.
It was as if he was starting to become whole.
He couldn't tell yet if this feeling would last, but he was enjoying it. Even Dad seemed to have noticed it when they were working on the boat. Normally, a morning of working with Dad would have led to fighting and butting heads every time they had a difference of opinion, which was almost always. But this had been different. There had been a little back-and-forth fussing, but for the most part they had worked together seamlessly. Eren didn't feel the instinctive urge to snap back twice as hard when his dad pushed him, and it seemed like his dad's bear was no longer rising to challenge Eren's bear every time he turned around. They had gotten twice as much work done as normal, and at the end his dad had slapped him on the shoulder and said, "Good job, son."
Good job, son.Those words lingered, giving him a reason for pleasure even beyond watching Lucy in her wholehearted joy.
He took her first of all to Heddy Westerly's inn and coffee shop. Lucy admired the tidy little building, with its white paint and hanging flower baskets and the carved gargoyles hanging over the eaves. "Why does it have those?" she asked, pointing up, as they came out with their drinks.
"It's sort of like our local thing. You'll see a lot more gargoyles as we walk around town. In fact, you can make a game out of spotting them, if you want. See how many you can count."
Lucy giggled around her straw. She had gotten one of Heddy's Blueberry Choco Coffee Frostees, a blended mocha milkshake mounded with whipped cream and chocolate shavings and heaps of real blueberries. "How many are there? Wow, this is good."
"That would spoil the fun," Eren pointed out, sipping his plain iced coffee. "Anyway, I don't think anyone knows. We used to try to figure it out when we were kids, but we were always finding new ones or discovering that our counts didn't match. Local lore says they move around a bit."
"Theywhat?" Lucy's eyes were round. "They don't really, do they?"
"I'm not sure," Eren admitted. "I would have said no, but ... I don't know, a lot of things are possible. And the local legend is that the gargoyles are where our town's protective magic comes from."
"You mentioned that earlier," Lucy said, turning serious. "Do you believe it?"
"Yes," Eren said simply. "I don't know if it can really do everything it's supposed to do. What I've heard is that no one who means harm to the town or its residents can enter it. I'm not sure if that's completely true. But it is true that ever since I've lived here, there's never been a crime here. Kids doing things like sneaking into abandoned buildings is about the worst of it. Oh, and I think every teenager in town tries to shoplift from Heddy's snack shop at some point, and every last one gets caught. The woman has a sixth sense."
"Oh look, another gargoyle," Lucy reported, pointing. They were climbing the hill now, the steep streets giving their legs a workout, and she had discovered the full-sized gargoyle in the flower-filled roundabout.
"Yeah, that's Fred."
"They havenames?" Lucy said around her straw.
"Some of them do. That's Fred. The one down on the dock with the fishing pole, I don't know if you noticed it, is Old Seabiscuit, or the old-timers call him Ole Biscuit. And the one with the flower crown we just passed is Gertie—"