Rule crossed to her, put his hands on her shoulders. "She is you."
"Sort of." Same soul, different memories. "I can't get it to come up to the top, but it feels important. If—"
The doorbell rang.
"I'll get it."
"Lily—"
"I'll get it," she repeated. And fled for the front door.
The house was familiar to her now. She knew where things were, could navigate the furniture in the dark. Most of the time she was glad to be here instead of in some bland and crowded hotel. And sometimes she felt as if the place were choking her.
These rooms held too much stuff. Beautiful stuff, of course: a Jacobean chest in the entry, a dining table whose dark wood gleamed beneath a crystal chandelier, a pair of Queen Anne chairs facing a plush sofa in the parlor. Excellent prints hung on the walls. Elegant arrangements occupied all the various surfaces— silk flowers, leather-bound books, candlesticks, brass or crystal whatnots.
Her mother would love it.
As Lily passed through the dining room she resisted the urge to sweep her arm along the sideboard and knock the cut-glass decanter, the shiny glasses on their silver tray, onto the floor.
Less stuff, she thought. More plants. She longed for at least one blank wall and air that smelled of the ocean.
She was homesick?
Maybe she wanted to be home so she could pull the covers over her head and hide from monsters, responsibilities, and change. Life was very simple with a blanket over your head.
She had to go up on tiptoe to see through the peephole in the front door. Whoever had installed it thought the whole world was at least five foot six.
What she saw had her rearing back in surprise.
The alarm was still disengaged. She unlocked the door, swung it open, and was hit with a second surprise.
The two people at her door must be planning to stay awhile. Each had a large duffel bag. The one she'd seen through the peephole was a man of average height with light brown hair. Those were the bits that looked normal. He was completely abnormal otherwise—head-turning, heart-stopping gorgeous, the most physically beautiful man she'd ever known.
Cullen Seabourne smiled at her. "Hello, luv. Look what I found."
The other person on her doorstep was much shorter than Cullen, too short to be seen through the peephole. He was cute, not sexy, and his smile lacked the cocky confidence of Cullen's.
He was eight years old.
"Hi, Lily," Toby said, his voice as wobbly as his smile. "Is my dad home?"
So far, Toby's interrogators hadn't gotten any more from him than Cullen had.
Rule and Lily sat at the kitchen table with Rule's surprising son. Dirty Harry had plunked his fat ass next to Cullen, who'd taken over slicing roast for sandwiches.
"It wasn't hard." Toby's set jaw made him, for a second, a miniature of his grandfather. "I went on the Internet an' booked the flight. There's a box to check if you're a minor, so I checked it."
"How alarming," Cullen murmured. Toby looked so much like Rule, and Rule so little like his own father, that he'd never noticed the resemblance before. It was a matter of expression rather than bone structure, he supposed. And scent. No question about it—Toby was a dominant.
"What?" Rule snapped.
Cullen appeased the beast at his feet with another scrap of roast, then used his knife to point. "Look at him. Can't you see Isen's ghostly image floating over that cherubic young face?"
Toby joined the adults in frowning at Cullen. "My granddad isn't a ghost."
"It's a metaphor." Cullen turned back to the cutting board to send the knife whizzing through a tomato, leaving a tidy pile of slices. "That's when you say a thing is something else to make a point. Like saying it's raining cats and dogs when, in fact, nothing more amazing than water is falling."
"But why's it alarming if I look like Granddad?"
"Isen kept going back for seconds when they handed out stubborn. Got way more than his share." Cullen dealt tomato slices over the meat heaped up on the sub rolls. "I'm thinking you did, too."
"We've wandered off the subject," Rule said. "How did you book the flight, Toby? I'm unaware of any companies that issue credit cards to children."
Toby looked down. "I used yours," he admitted. "The numbers of it. I had them 'cause… 'member when you let me order that music?"
"I see." Rule's voice was utterly level. "Two months ago, you memorized my credit card number so you could use it again without permission."
"No!" Toby sat up straight. "I didn't… I mean, the computer 'membered the number, not me. I didn't know I'd need it. I mean," he said again, correcting himself meticulously, "I didn't plan on being bad. Only then I had to."
"Which brings us back to the original question," Lily said gently. "Why?"
Toby shrugged, kicked the table leg, and wouldn't look at any of them.
Poor kid. Wasn't it obvious? Cullen grabbed two plates and crossed to the table. "Me and my mum got along fine," he said. "It was my dad who couldn't deal with what I was."
Toby's serious face swung up toward him. "But your dad was a lupus! He knew what you were."
"He wasn't a sorcerer. Or even a witch, like my mother. Mum wasn't thrilled when I accidentally burned something— my Gift was greater than my control when I was young—but she didn't think I was too weird for words because I could see magic." He set a plate in front of Toby. "My father couldn't handle it."
Toby's eyes, dark and intent, fixed on Cullen's face. "Your dad didn't like you?"
"He didn't trust me." He said that as if it didn't matter, though after all these years that simple truth still stuck in his throat. "I possessed a power he didn't understand. He thought I ought to be able to give that up to fit into his world. And I couldn't."
Lily and Rule exchanged glances.
The house phone rang. "That's probably your grandmother," Rule said, standing.
Mrs. Asteglio hadn't been home when Rule called, but that wasn't surprising. She didn't think her grandson was missing; she thought he'd flown to D.C. to spend Christmas with his father. Exactly true, of course. She just didn't know it had been all Toby's doing, not Rule's.
Quite an achievement, really, Cullen reflected as he delivered two more plates to people with no interest in food. The boy possessed unsuspected talents.
Toby's lower lip jutted out. He opened the sub roll and gave full attention to removing the tomato Cullen had just placed there. "She's gonna be mad. I don't see why we can't just tell her you want me here."
Rule stopped in midstep, swung around, and knelt on one knee in front of his son, putting their faces on a level. He gripped Toby's shoulders. "I want you here." His voice was low and fierce. "I have always wanted you with me. You know that."
Lily looked at the two of them and went to get the phone.
"Hello? Yes, Mrs. Asteglio, he arrived just fine. The problem is that we didn't know he was coming."
Cullen took his own plate to the table and listened to both conversations—Lily explaining to the grandmother that they hadn't sent for Toby, and Rule explaining to his son the difference between wanting him here and allowing him to show up on his own initiative.
The boy certainly had shown initiative. Cullen took a bite of his sandwich. Toby had planned his adventure well, right up to the moment the stewardess expected to hand him off to a waiting parent. The jig would have been up then if Cullen's plane hadn't landed when it did—just enough ahead of Toby's for Cullen to be making his way down the concourse and hear a familiar voice.
What are the odds? he thought, taking another bite. Then he put his sandwich down, his eyes narrowing in thought.
Coincidences happen all the time. People run into someone from their hometown while thousands of miles away, or stand in line behind a stranger with the same last name. Statisticians worked their own sort of magic to show that these events were less - remarkable than they seemed. In a country of 280 million people, you could expect a one-in-a-million event 280 times a day.