Especially our current accommodation. We were staying at an awesome boutique hotel named after Winston Churchill. We didn’t have the presidential suite—that went to Luke and Griffin. But we did have a really cute room with a four-poster bed. The hotel also had this amazing grand stairway that seemed to go up and up, forever, and had hugely tall bookcases on the ground floor, and then the walls were covered in pictures on the higher floors.

It also had a large lawn in front, perfect for weapons practice, and an adorable little smoking hut, complete with a telephone into the bar, for people to enjoy a cigar. I think even Churchill, himself, would have approved.

Smoking hut or sex hut? my libido queried, reminding me that it wanted to fit in some good bouts of nookie in case we were, indeed, killed.

Hush, I told it. We have to practice.

To be honest, the practice felt good. I’d been pretty sedentary, for me, for a while, so the workout was needed. It also felt like I was bonding with the labrys, in a weird way. The more time I spent with it, the more I felt like it approved of me. It was a strange feeling, and even weirder to think I cared whether an inanimate object liked me. And yet I couldn’t help but like the labrys right back, an emotion made stronger by our time spent practicing.

“Good. You can stop now.”

I brought my movements to a halt, working out a crick in my neck as I waited for more instructions.

“We’ve done lots of blade work, which is important. But remember your weapon has more than just the blade. It has the haft,” and with this, Anyan came and stood behind me, encircling me in his arms as his hands grasped the warm wooden haft right below my own. “And it has the butt of the haft. Both are important, as offensive and defensive weapons.”

Soon I was working on another set of drills, these focused on teaching me to use the haft of the ax to block an attack, and the butt as a pummeling tool. I couldn’t help but smile, imagining knocking the wind out of Stuart, back in Rockabill, with a swift punch to the stomach using my labrys. It was petty, and I had way bigger, badder enemies, but the thought was still satisfying.

After a dozen rounds of that exercise, I was well and truly sweaty. When Anyan called it quits, I vanished the labrys with a pained grunt, holding out my hands for the barghest to heal. He came over and did so, watching me with a contented expression on his face.

“You did great, Jane. You move well.”

“Thanks. But I think the ax helps me, to be honest.”

“I think it does too. You’re way better than you should be. But all that matters is if you’re good. You want a beer?”

“Huh?” I asked, still focused on his compliments.

“Do you want a beer?”

“Um, sure,” I said.

Anyan looked around to make sure no humans were watching us, and then he carefully pulled his glamour. We were standing in the middle of the front lawn of the hotel, but we’d been under a heavy glamour so no passersby could see. When we were all revealed, he headed in to the hotel. I gave one last long, full body stretch, then walked over to one of the tables set out on a small terrace next to the windows looking into the bar. I took a seat, leaning back with a contented sigh. The sun wasn’t too strong, but it felt good on my skin. I very much missed basking on a rock after my swims.

After only a few minutes of me lapping up the warm day, Anyan was back with two pints of lager and a pint of water. I gratefully sucked down the water, and then started in on the pint.

We clinked glasses, and I sighed contentedly as I raised the drink to my lips.

“You were superb last night,” Anyan said.

“I know,” I said, archly, giving him a naughty smile.

“You were superb then, too, but I meant speaking to that crowd.”

I shrugged. “Oh, that. I was all right. Blondie got everyone together, and everything.”

“But still, you were great.”

“Thanks. But…”

“Stop saying ‘but’ and take a compliment,” Anyan interrupted, his affectionate tone undercutting the commanding nature of his words.

“Sorry,” I said, with a self-deprecating laugh. “I’m bad about that. Seriously, though, I know I did a pretty good job. But you and Blondie are the ones that always set everything up. I’d be lost without you two.”

“Yes, well, did you ever think we’d be lost without you?”

I took a long draught from my drink, feeling a warm flush of happiness heat my cheeks. Hearing that Blondie and Anyan thought of me as important kind of choked me up.

But not enough that I couldn’t down about half of my pint in one go.

I hadn’t been drinking at all recently, and I’d just been exercising on a light breakfast, so the pint went almost immediately to my head. Leaning back in my chair, I enjoyed my faint buzz as I smiled at Anyan.

“We’d all be lost without each other,” I compromised. Anyan, however, didn’t react, except to scoot his chair a bit closer and draw my legs up onto his lap. His fingers toyed with the laces on my new red champion’s Converse as he focused his gaze on my feet.

“I’d definitely be lost without you,” he said. I felt my throat close briefly at his words, my brain going into overtime that he’d just admitted what he had. But while what he said made me want to leap up and do the Hammer dance, his tone and the expression on his face told me he wasn’t entirely happy about feeling the way he did.

“It’s kind of scary, isn’t it,” I said, carefully. “Loving someone.”

He looked up at me, acknowledging what I’d just hinted at, but not pressuring me to say more.

“It is,” he said, stroking a gentle hand down my denim-covered calf.

“What happened, Anyan?”

The barghest remained silent, and he’d gone back to looking at my shoes. His hand lay heavily on my shin, seeming to weigh a ton.

“I know something had to have happened. The way you talk about love, and the things you’ve said about your past. You lost someone didn’t you?” When he still didn’t speak, I made another leap. “Does it have to do with Ryu?”

Anyan snorted, shaking his head. “It’s nothing to do with Ryu. Well, at least, not really. What happened was way before Ryu’s time, although I guess it’s at the heart of why he and I don’t understand each other.”

“So what did happen?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“I dunno… did you kill all your wives, like Bluebeard, or something?”

The smile he gave me was sad. “No, nothing like that. But I did love someone, before.”

It was my turn to snort derisively. “Of course you did, Anyan. I managed to love someone before, too, and I’m like an eighth of your age. I imagine you’ve cared for a lot of people in your lifetime.”

“I know, I know,” he said, placatingly. “It’s just that some people don’t like to hear about this stuff.”

“As long as you don’t take to scrapbooking albums of All the Women I’ve Loved Before, I’m fine hearing about your past. I want to know you. You know my entire life, and I know nothing about yours.”

“You were a very cute baby,” he said playfully, as I made an ick face.

“That’s both disgusting and rather disturbing,” I said. “Now spill.”

He took a long pull from his pint, then, using my shin as a coaster, he started talking.

“First you have to understand where and when I was born. My parents were some of the first foreign supes to come over to the New World, and I was born here. There were lots of opportunities that came with moving, but things were definitely not settled in terms of politics. There were native forces to contend with, obviously. Plus powerful Alfar kept coming over in waves, thinking they’d be able to carve themselves out a kingdom. They often did, but then they had to defend it.

“My parents had come over with an initial wave from the human Scandinavia. Some, although not all, of the rumors of Viking explorers in the New World came from them. Anyway, they’d been seeking asylum away from the crazy leader of their own Territory, and had been taken in by the local native Alfar leader, who ran her Territory like a Native American tribe.

“The Alfar that followed in our wake, however, were strong, and soon my childhood leader fell. My parents and I were left without a place in our own Territory, so we moved east. There, we joined a human tribe that knew about supernaturals, and who sought out my parents as shamans.

“I loved living with the humans. There’d always been a lot of interplay between supes and the humans in my former territory, but living entirely amongst humans was different. Better. It’s there I first learned I had a gift for art. I’d always been good with my hands, good at making things, and my parents apprenticed me to the weapons maker of the tribe. But he considered himself an artist. He’s the one who first taught me where art comes from: that place in the soul where experience meets imagination. He also taught me to see beauty in the grotesque, and the grotesque in beauty. He was a good man.”

Anyan’s smile was affectionate, but his expression was distant. He was really immersing himself in this story. I had the feeling it was something he didn’t share often, if at all, and he was as caught up in his seldom-explored memories as I was.