Effy knew Preston would not be pleased with her being late. She hurriedly jammed her arms into her sweater sleeves and her feet into her boots. She hesitated at the door, fingers hovering above the iron knob. Now that she had seen the Fairy King in daylight, her old survival tactics could not be entirely trusted.
She slipped two of the pink pills into her mouth and swallowed them dry. Then Effy wrenched the door open and ran, skidding breathlessly up the path toward Hiraeth.
By the time she arrived, she was panting, her skin buzzing with adrenaline. She’d seen no flashes of damp hair in the gaps between trees. As she passed the front of the house, she looked in the driveway for Ianto’s car, but—blessedly—it was gone.
Two seabirds were pecking at something in the tire marks instead. A run-over animal, mangled and flat. Effy didn’t get close enough to tell what it was. She saw only the matted, bloody fur and her stomach turned over on itself. She clambered up the stairs into the house.
Preston was waiting for her in the study, a mug of coffee in his hands and a reproachful look on his face. “You’re late.”
Effy glanced out the window, which held a tender pink light. “It’s still dawn. Besides, that’s not fair. You slept here.”
“And I had time to get coffee and everything.” Preston looked down meaningfully at his mug. “If you’d been here at dawn, you could’ve gotten some, too.”
She drew a breath and resisted rolling her eyes, but the utter predictability of his reaction was oddly comforting. After all the strangeness, her nightmares, Ianto’s violently shifting moods, Preston’s reliable fussiness was almost like a balm.
Not that she would ever tell him that.
“You asked me not to fight you at every turn, but you promised to be fifteen percent less condescending,” she reminded him. “So you have to let me win sometimes.”
Preston’s lips thinned. “Fine,” he relented. “You can win this one, whatever that means to you.”
Pleased by his acquiescence, Effy considered what a suitable trophy would be. “It means you have to give me your coffee.”
He heaved an enormous, persecuted sigh, but passed her the mug. Purposefully keeping eye contact with Preston over the rim, Effy swallowed a small sip and gagged.
Of course Preston Héloury took his coffee black. She put down the mug, trying to hide her grimace.
“Did you see Ianto leave?” Preston asked.
“No, he was already gone.” Effy thought about the animal carcass in the road. It had been too small to be a deer but too large to be a rabbit, large enough that Ianto would have seen it through the windshield, and kept his foot pressed down on the gas pedal anyway.
The image of the Fairy King sitting there in the driver’s seat blinked across her vision. Effy had to dig her fingernails into her palm to make it vanish again.
“We should hurry,” Preston said. “I think Llyrian services only last an hour, but you would know better than me.”
As they began walking toward the door, Effy said, “So my suspicions were correct—Argantians are heathens.”
“Not all Argantians,” he said, nonplussed, almost cheerful. “Just me.”
“I’m sure your Llyrian mother is very pleased with you.”
“She does her best to make me feel guilty about it.” They started down the hall.
“But she can’t really be that sanctimonious,” Effy said as they rounded the corner to the bedchamber, “or else she wouldn’t have married an Argantian.”
“You’d be surprised how much cognitive dissonance people are capable of.”
“Do you ever get weary of being so snootily unsentimental?”
Preston huffed a laugh. “No, it comes very naturally to me.”
“You know, you could have said that love transcends petty theological squabbles.”
“Love conquers all?” Preston arched a brow. “I suppose I could say that, if I were a romantic.”
Effy snorted, but for some reason her heart thumped unevenly. She told herself it was nervousness about their assuredly ill-fated plan, and—as Preston reached for the door—the memory of the ghost surged forward in her mind. Her white hair lashing like a cut sail, her skin so pale it was almost translucent.
A similar coldness prickled Effy’s skin, and she almost said, Wait, stop. But it would be useless to mention the encounter to Preston. She knew without asking that he was not the type to believe in ghosts.
Mrs. Myrddin, on the other hand, was perhaps worth bringing up. “Be quiet,” she said tersely. “The widow must be in here.”