Page 129 of Heartsong
Happiness looks good on you.
And so did the slinky red number she’d picked out for date night. Never in a million years would she have thought to wear the body-hugging, strappy red dress, but something had come over her lately.
I wanna see his reaction to it.Okay, well, there was that. Frey never disappointed.
With extra room in the budget thanks to Carys and Gavren refusing to even hear the wordrent,Anna had been able to splurge a bit on her wardrobe, and the red dress and strappy heels were one of the first things that called to her. She hadn’t been brave enough to wear them out yet, but dinner at a swanky restaurant in SF felt like the perfect excuse.
Her little purse packed, Anna closed the door to their guesthouse/cottage/love nest and picked her way carefully across the courtyard to the main house. The late spring air hummed with vibrancy, just on the right side of warm. The sky above was streaked in lilac and peach, a pretty backdrop to the fairy lights Frey and Gavren had strung through the courtyard to help light her way.
They were always thinking of ways to make her life easier and safer, what with her dull human senses.
Living with a basically immortal, non-human couple the past few months had been…interesting. Carys and Gavren went above and beyond graciousness, and after the first month, the four of them had fallen into an easy coexistence, allowing them to be friends rather than hosts and guests.
The main thing Anna had to get her head around was how differently Carys and Gavren spent their time. Having lived for so long, with as much time as they had to do whatever they wanted, neither ever seemed overly hurried. If Carys wanted to read a book, she often sat in a comfy chair by a window and read the book. In full. If Gavren was working on one of his projects in the workroom he’d made out of the second garage, he often wouldn’t emerge again until it was done. They didn’t really need breaks and often forgot to take them with their minds focused elsewhere.
Despite this and being literally ancient, they didn’t mind the new interruptions. In fact, they seemed to enjoy shifting to a more mortal schedule and often invited Anna and Frey for meals. The biggest adjustment was remembering that they couldn’t run around naked in the courtyard playing sexy catch-me-if-you-can when Anna and Frey were home.
The first time the four of them ran into each other in the courtyard during one such romp, Carys had giggled as Frey slapped a hand over Anna’s eyes.“Ooh, I forgot. Inside we go, my love, before we embarrass the children,”Carys had joked. After that, there’d been no more naked run-ins, though there were a few close calls.
Honestly, even though it mortified Anna in the moment, knowing that the two had been together for literally hundreds of years and were still hungry for each other melted Anna.“Of course they are,”Frey said when she mentioned it, his tone suggesting that she was silly to think otherwise,“that’s the way of guardians. We’re always hungry for our heartsong.”And that conversation led to their own sexy romp—as did most conversations, if she was being honest.
It was a bit wild, but after a while, they adapted fairly well to living together. Work at the museum helped, and whenever Carys and Gavren wanted to go in for the day, all four of them commuted via portal. She still wasn’t used to the feeling of getting her molecules pulled apart and then put back together in the space of two seconds, but Carys was right, it was less painful than Bay Area traffic.
Opening one of the French doors, Anna stepped inside the main house. It smelled of sweetness and fruit; Carys must’ve been canning again. Preserving fruit and making jam was one of her current hobbies—one that she returned to and fell in love with every few decades or so, as she put it. The cottage’s and all the museum docents’ pantries were all stuffed with every kind of jam and preserve you could ever want.
Carys’s blonde head was visible over the top of the plush sectional couch. As Anna approached, Captain’s black head popped up from Carys’s lap. After the first week, they’d stopped trying to contain Captain to the cottage and instead let him roam. Gavren assured her the property was warded and their animals knew to stay inside the boundary.
Anna had fretted at first, but when she saw how their two dogs minded, and heard about the hundreds of pets they’d kept during their lives, she conceded and let Captain live his best life. For the most part, he stuck to the cottage when she and Frey were home, but he also adored chasing butterflies and laying in sun puddles in the courtyard. She thought she was still his favorite person, but Carys was quickly gaining in the rankings. He loved to lay with her in the sun while she read since she didn’t have to get up and move around much.
Hearing her coming, Carys looked up, too. “Ooh!” she exclaimed, turning so she could see Anna in her dress. “You look wonderful!”
“Thank you,” Anna said with a blush.
“Go on, give us a twirl!”
She rolled her eyes but obliged. The dress didn’t have much twirl, hugging her curves, but she spun on her heels to show off the fit.
“Your bum looks fabulous!”
Anna snorted in surprise. “Thank you?”
“Oh like you don’t know.” Carys winked. “You two don’t stay out too late, though. I want you home by ten, young lady.”
“Yes, Mama Carys.” They shared a laugh over their ongoing joke, that Carys and Gavren were both easily old enough to be her parents many times over. Carys had a maternal quality about her, and more than once she’d fussed over both Anna and Frey, whether they were comfortable enough, eating enough, if they were happy and healthy and getting enough sunlight.
It was a new experience, to be fussed over and looked after, and it’d taken a while for Anna to warm up to it. At first it felt a bit invasive and overbearing, but given time, she came to enjoy the attention. Carys genuinely cared. She looked after her like a clanmate, and just as Anna came to appreciate what it meant to be Frey’s heartsong, she now understood what it meant to be part of a guardian clan.
It didn’t hurt either that working with Carys was downright fascinating. When Anna wasn’t ogling all the amazing things Carys had collected over the centuries, she was listening raptly to anecdotes about this major event or that famous person. Anna had more than once asked Carys to describe their time in Renaissance Italy in painstaking detail and gobbled it all up.
The cataloging was moving along now that they had a system down, and there were definitely years of work to do. Once she had a good handle on it, she wanted to help Carys and Gavren document their long lives. It might never be shown to anyone else, but for posterity and their own memories, she thought it worthwhile. And she was greedy for more stories.
So yeah, life was good. So good, sometimes she had to center and remind herself it wasn’t a dream, that she deserved good things, too.
There was still the threat of Glendower looming; they hadn’t heard anything from him and he’d stopped frequenting the museum. They’d taken a little fieldtrip one weekend to scope out the property he owned in Carmel but found only a spacious, empty beach house. He’d gone to ground somewhere and taken Dragan with him.
Then there were her headaches. Gavren had been right, magick wasn’t a silver bullet, and while he could ease her pain, he insisted she continue to seek treatment. He kept his promise, reading up on the literature on migraines and other chronic headaches, and gave her a list of things to ask her neurologist at each appointment. So far, the treatments were going well and she was managing her migraines much better.
Meaning she spent a whole lot less time nursing a headache—and that much more with her hunky gargoyle mate.
