Chapter 18

  Home sweet home. The same home. But it felt very different out here.

  I mean, it absolutely was the same. The property was identical down to the scratch on the front door where Portia’s hammer had caught it during a sparring accident two weeks ago. The teleportation moved the house, the barn, the half-renovated silo with Wilkinson’s scaffolding still on it, the privacy fence, and the field where the portal opened every night, all of it exactly where it was supposed to be relative to everything else. Anya had basically cut our land out of one place and slapped it onto another, like a copy-paste function.

  The surroundings were a different story. The sky had a permanent bruise to it, even heavier than I was used to. It was a sort of permanent gray overcast that made ten in the morning look like just before a lame sunrise.

  My phone said it was morning. The sky disagreed. It was kind of like that.

  I’d heard it said that Wapa Lake territory experienced roughly eighteen hours of dimness and six hours of actual darkness per day. I’d thought that was an exaggeration.

  Anya’s castle was a lot closer than the actual lake for which the town was named. Like I’d seen when Anya snapped her fingers and teleported us, the Beaumont place was about two hundred yards from our front gate, just across the main road and down a block. It loomed over the surrounding buildings the same way it had when we first pulled up for the meeting. Seeing it from my own porch was going to take some getting used to.

  Elysia saw it first and her whole body went stiff. “Oh how I long for my own parapets! When I was in my kingdom, I had parapets, and I miss them every single day!” She grabbed my arm and pressed herself against my side. “You have money. Do you think you could buy me some parapets?”

  “I have only the broadest sense of what that is, and if it is what I think it is, it might be tacky to have our own parapets right across the street from our de facto boss’s parapets.”

  Clementine groaned. “Stop saying parapets.”

  I took that advice and looked around, but it wasn’t just the sights that were strange. The sounds here were different too. Back at the old property, the ambient noise was crickets, wind, and the occasional truck on the county road. Here, the backdrop was harder to identify. There were distant howls, for one thing. Some light traffic, too, actually. It would take some getting used to.

  Juniper’s physical body was back in her own skin now that we were home, and she was already outside marveling at the magic in the air along with the rest of us.

  “The ambient magical energy here is unlike anything I’ve ever felt,” she said, and her voice had a reverence to it that was borderline sexy. “The concentration of magical power here is so intense, It’s almost hard to breathe when I focus on it.”

  I frowned. “Is that bad? Do we need to get you an inhaler or something?”

  “No. It means my spells will be stronger if I can tap into it, but I don’t want to be too presumptuous just yet. I wonder if we’ll all get a boost. The System, after all, is magic.” She looked up from her tablet with her red eyes almost glowing.

  “Just like friendship,” I said, patting Clementine on her butt.

  “If I become fully convinced that you just made a My Little Pony joke at my expense, I will sit on your face and not get up when you tap out.”

  Elysia sighed and clucked her tongue before offering her two cents. “What, pray tell, in your history with Sir Josh makes you believe that such a threat will correct his behavior?”

  My beautiful mind was already at work thinking up more My Little Pony jokes.

  Portia had wandered over to the fence line and was jumping up and down trying to see over it. She’d get about two seconds of airtime per jump, her floppy ears catching wind on the way up, and each time she landed she’d bounce right back. Her tail was going at full speed between leaps.

  “Master,” she whispered loudly between bounces. “There’s a werewolf out there.”

  “How can you even tell? You’re getting like half a second of visual per jump.”

  “I can smell him! And I saw him too! He has groceries!” She jumped again, hung at the peak for a beat, and gasped. “He’s looking at me now!”

  She landed, took a breath, and barked over the fence. This was not a combat bark or a warning bark, but a friendly, full-body bark that made her whole torso bounce. “ARF!”

  Then, from the other side of the fence came a deep, resonant “RORF”.

  Portia’s eyes went huge. “Master. He barked back. HE BARKED BACK. Can I go introduce myself! And you as my evil master?”

  “Portia, we’ve been here for twenty minutes. Let’s not start a diplomatic incident just yet.”

  “It wouldn’t be an incident! It would be an introduction!”

  I tabled the werewolf introduction and went to find Clementine. She had walked the full perimeter of the fence in silence and was now standing at the back gate looking out at the lake. Her beanie was off and her ears were rotating slowly, processing the new soundscape.

  “So we live in monster town now,” she said when I came up beside her. “Cool. At least pizza delivery is probably more reliable here. I could probably get a job again.”

  “Not unless you really want to. I’ve got plenty of money to last us plenty of lifetimes. You okay?”

  She tilted her head and one ear swiveled toward the distant howling. “It’s weird. I’ve spent months trying to hide what I am. I mean—like, boots over the hooves, hat over the ears, better not let anyone see the tail. Here, I’d be an afterthought.” She looked at me and something in her eyes had relaxed, something that had been tight for a while. “Yeah, Josh. I think I might be okay.”

  I put my arm around her shoulders and she leaned into it gently.

  Around noon a skeleton arrived at the front gate carrying a canvas tote bag with the Beaumont crest on it. It knocked three times, waited for me to open the gate, and held out the bag without a word. It just stood there while I took the bag. Then it kept standing there while I processed what was happening, and it only left after I thanked it, turning on its heel like a FedEx driver who had forty more stops.

  Inside the bag was a welcome package of sorts. At least, that’s how I took it. It included a folded territory map printed on heavy paper, a list of local delivery restaurants and governmental offices, and a coupon for ten percent off tires at W-Mart Auto.

  There were also a few rules. The rules were… specific. There was to be no sunlight manipulation of any kind within territory borders, no noise above conversational volume during rest hours, which were 10 AM to 4 PM. No feeding stray hellhounds, even if they look hungry, no unauthorized portal creation (which I assumed didn’t apply to me), and no holy water allowed for any purposes except for inside of churches.

  “Interesting rules,” Juniper said, reading over my shoulder. “They’re easy to understand at least. Though I have to wonder what prompted the hellhound feeding policy.”

  “Somebody probably fed the hellhounds,” I said, shrugging. “Then they probably got their face eaten or something.”

  Elysia examined the map with furrowed brows and a very straight back, trying to look important and serious. “The castle is closer than it appears from here.” She traced a path with her finger. “And there is the department store. W-Mart. I require an expedition. My wardrobe suffered during the relocation.”

  I blinked a few times. “While I haven’t checked, I’m pretty sure your wardrobe was relocated perfectly intact.”

  Her hands landed on her hips. “It suffered feelings of distress, Sir Josh. In elven culture, garments have a spirit of their own, and the best way to calm a restless garment’s spirit is to introduce it to new friends.”

  I looked at Juniper, brows arched. “Is this true?”

  “No, but she is certainly very creative.”

  The portal opened that night at 12:07 AM, right on schedule, and for the first time in months I wasn’t the only line of defense standing between it and everything I cared about.

  A squad of eight skeletons had walked through the front gate and taken positions around the field perimeter thirty minutes before the portal opened. They moved into formation without a sound, each one carrying a tower shield and a short spear, and they formed a containment ring that boxed in the portal’s emergence zone from every angle. They weren’t there to fight, though. They were there to make sure whatever came through couldn’t get past them, and watching them set up in deathly silence was pretty nifty, I have to admit.

  I stood in the field with my sword drawn and Clementine in horse form beside me. I was nervous, sure. Focused, absolutely. But the gut-level dread that had been sitting in my stomach every night for the past few weeks was quieter, because if something went wrong tonight there was a perimeter behind us, and behind that perimeter was a territory run by the daughter of Dracula herself.

  We were in good hands.

  The creature that came through was a nasty fuck. It was best described as some kind of armored insectoid the size of a riding lawnmower with mandibles that could cut steel and a carapace that hurt my sword’s ego the first two times I hit it. But we had the full party, and the containment perimeter meant we didn’t have to worry about it breaking for the house. Not only that, but Juniper’s boosted magic hit like a freight train in the energy-rich environment. Her frost breath didn’t just coat the thing’s legs. It flash-froze them solid, and Portia shattered the frozen limbs with two hammer strikes that she’d never have landed cleanly without the containment ring funneling the creature toward her.

  Clementine and I ran the kill. We fired Mounted Charge through the gap Portia had opened, impaling my sword through the cracked carapace. With a crunchy twist, the thing went down before minute three.

  Not bad, not bad. I could get used to this.

  The skeleton squad held their perimeter until the portal scar sealed, then filed out of the field in the same silent order they’d arrived in. One of them gave me a nod as it passed, or at least I think it was a nod. It was hard to tell with skeletons. In any case, I chose to read it as professional acknowledgment from one night-shift worker to another, and that made me feel like one of the boys.

  Of course, that very well could have been a female skeleton. Not like I could tell.

  VICTORY! XP Gained! LEVEL UP! Level 21 achieved. You have one new skill point and one new attribute point.

  ALLOCATE YOUR SKILL POINT:

  Shield Wall (When fighting near allied units, gain a passive defense bonus proportional to their number. Bonus increases with allied unit quality.)

  Journeyman Fishing (Cast a magical fishing line. Improved bait selection. 15% increased catch rate in freshwater environments.)

  Shield Wall. I had allied units now, actual allied units, and the skill was basically designed for fighting alongside a skeleton perimeter. Sorry again, fish. Maybe level 22, but honestly I was starting to think the System was trolling me with the fishing option.

  One of these days though, I might have to take that Journeyman Fishing shit because, Christ, it was relentless.

  ALLOCATE YOUR ATTRIBUTE POINT.

  “STR,” I said. Twenty-one. My sword was going to hit harder, and I’d be one step closer to looking like Conan the Barbarian.

  Attribute increased: Strength (Now 21)

  We went to bed around two in the morning, staying up a little later to sort of celebrate with order-in pizza, gas station beer, and some DVRed episodes of Clementine’s K-drama.

  At the end of the night, the Russian mattress received us gently, almost seductively. Elysia curled against my right side with her tiara on the nightstand and her hand fisted in my pajama shirt. She was naked, of course.

  Portia, also naked, took the left, her tail draped across my legs, and one ear twitching in her sleep every time the distant howling picked up outside.

  Juniper’s coils wound around my ankles and the foot of the bed, warm and heavy, and through the bond her emotional state was the calmest I’d ever felt from her. She was also naked, by the way.

  Then I heard a voice. “Don’t make a big thing out of this, but I’ve decided it’s time I start sleeping in here too.” Clementine whispered as she joined us in the bed. She climbed in on Elysia’s side and settled with her back to the room and her tail curled around herself. “Fucking lame as hell that I can’t reach you, though. We need to work out a rotation or something.”

  “Good luck negotiating that with the princess,” I chuckled. “But I’m sure we can work something out. Welcome, by the way.”

  “Yeah whatever. I love you. Say it back or I’ll use your penis like a punching bag when you fall asleep.”

  “Love you too,” I said, holding in a laugh. And it was true. God help me, I adored them all.

  Chapter 19

  Weeks went by. A new normal started to settle.

  Mornings always started in the kitchen, though we often woke a bit later due to the extended nighttime of Wapa Lake. I usually cooked eggs and bacon, but sometimes Clementine helped with that, or Portia got up early and decided to be industrious and almost burn the house down.

  But more recently, the operation had grown beyond a one-man show. Clementine took over the stovetop for anything Korean, which she was doing more often these days. We now frequently had kimchi fried rice in the breakfast rotation, and my life was measurably better for that fact. Juniper handled tea and sliced the fruit. She also started dabbling with meal planning because she’d calculated everyone’s caloric and nutritional requirements. Portia set the table and did a pretty horrible job at it, but it worked. We always had a fork, knife, spoon, napkin, and mug at the very least, but they were never in the same location in relation to the plate two times in a row. She also started putting out a small bowl of water for herself on the floor, which nobody commented on.

  Elysia supervised from the counter, which meant she sat on a stool in a see-through nightgown or less and critiqued everything.

  “The eggs are not eggy enough. They lack a certain level of fluff. In the Silverwood Kingdom, our eggs were practically clouds.”

  “Did you have normal chickens in the Silverwood Kingdom,” I asked.

  She scoffed proudly. “We had BETTER than chickens. We had a silver-plumed ground phoenix whose eggs tasted—well actually, chicken eggs are better.”

  To Elysia’s credit, she was getting better at making coffee, thanks to several hours a week of tutoring from Clementine. The woman’s patience was saintly.

  Afternoons were typically about training and maintenance. Well, sometimes. Most of the time they were for Super Plumber Cart and pussy eating, but we had our moments.

  Most often, Clementine and I ran mounted combat drills in the field, and her speed had gotten pretty nuts. She could hit a full gallop in three strides now, and the Cavalier bond between us was so tuned that I could feel her acceleration in my own legs before she even moved. We’d developed a shorthand through the mental link that made verbal communication on my end unnecessary during most fights, which was good because verbal communication during a full-speed Mounted Charge mostly consisted of me trying not to bite my own tongue off.

  Juniper spent her afternoons in the silo. Anya’s people—or skeletons—had finished the renovation in four days after Wilkinson understandably couldn’t make his next appointment on account of the property now being inside a vampire schoolgirl’s domain. The construction crew had been efficient, silent, and unironically the most reliable and punctual contractors I’d ever known.

  So, Juniper finally had her workshop. About damn time. The first time she walked into the completed space she stood in the doorway for about thirty seconds without saying a word, which I confessed, kind of stressed me out. But her tail coiled slowly around the doorframe like it was hugging the building, and then she squeezed and kissed my hand. That was a very good feeling.

  Portia trained with me occasionally, but mostly we just played fetch with the Return Blade ability. She loved it, and I loved making her happy, and she was so fucking cute the way she always caught my sword between her teeth. Even better, she made a Hellhound girl friend at the Pump N’ Go, and she sometimes came by to join us, but I had to use a frisbee when she was over.

  Elysia’s CON was capped now, but we were looking for ways to help her cope and work on her fitness outside of her stats. Slowly, painfully, through a regimen that Juniper had designed and that Elysia hated with a burning passion, she did exercises on the porch every afternoon. When she finished she’d collapse into my arms and announce that she deserved a reward for her immense suffering. The reward was always some variation on making out or having sex after carrying her inside. Never let it be said that I didn’t deliver, because I did it every time. It was true and she weighed about as much as one of Juniper’s tits, so the logistics worked out.

  The portal fights had changed in a way, too. They were still dangerous, still nightly, and still theoretically capable of producing something that could kill us if we got careless, but the skeleton perimeter turned every encounter from a tense scramble into a contained engagement within which we had every advantage. That did a ton to take the edge off, as it were. Also, Juniper’s boosted magic in the energy-rich environment meant we had options we’d never had before. The fights averaged two minutes now. Two. Fucking. Minutes. We took injuries occasionally, but they were always manageable little scrapes, and Portia’s healing kept everyone looking good as new.

  The night I took both Elysia and Portia to bed wasn’t planned, but it had been building for a while in that way where two women spend weeks competing over who loves you harder and then both decide to cash in on the same night.

  Those two had gotten close in a way that was hard to explain if you didn’t live with them. Portia had always loved the princess. That was never in question. She teased her, antagonized her, offered to wash her hair every morning like a handmaiden, and backed up every lie Elysia told if she thought it would earn her a pat on the head. But lately Elysia had started returning the affection in her own prickly way. She still called Portia names, but they’d started sitting next to each other on the couch during Clementine’s drama hour, sometimes even sharing my lap without competition, and recently I caught the princess braiding Portia’s hair more and more often.