The Druid Next Door Read online

Alun had been the Queen’s Champion.

  Once the Champion was back, the Enforcer had to retire from the lists, and Alun had been miraculously restored to his full status, rights, and abilities, thanks to David helping him overcome his curse. So the councils, the Queen, even the club boys could get along without Mal just fine now.

  But if I hadn’t cut Rodric Luchullain’s hand off at the wrist, Alun would be dead now—David too, and maybe Gareth as well.

  Some sacrifices were worth the cost.

  “Mal?” David fidgeted with one of the machine’s cables. “Is that— I mean, are you okay?”

  He forced a smile for David’s benefit. “Aye. Alun’s a manipulative bastard. Much more suited to the job. He should be able to get them to toe the party line.”

  David chuckled, the anxiety fading from his expression. “It takes a manipulative bastard to know one, Mal.”

  Mal glanced around, checking for Gareth’s whereabouts. Judging by the sounds emanating from the back of the house, Gareth found the place just as ridiculous as Mal. Not that Gareth, the last full bard in all of Faerie, ever sounded anything less than perfectly musical, even when snorting derisively at low-flow toilets, LED light fixtures, or whatever else had caught his fancy.

  “Has Alun had a chance to talk to the Queen yet?” Mal kept his voice low. With Gareth’s longstanding hatred of the Queen, he’d have a fit if he knew Mal was angling to get an audience with Her coldhearted Majesty—even though it was to get his sentence commuted and his curse removed.

  David didn’t meet his eyes as he set up the PT machine and affixed the contacts on Mal’s right arm and hand. “I told you. He’s been tied up with the supe councils.”

  “They can’t take all his time. He has a practice to run and a husband to shag. You’d be a damn sight less chipper if he’d been neglecting that particular duty.”

  David’s cheeks pinked—adorable, really. No wonder Alun had fallen so hard, but it had made him even more self-righteous than usual, holding his relationship up as the way to true happiness.

  True happiness would be the end of this fragging exile and a return to my rightful place in Faerie.

  Mal knew why he’d earned his cursed hand—he’d broken one of the primal laws of Faerie when he’d maimed the Queen’s Consort. But why had he been cursed with one brother who believed the process of redemption was a necessary part of recovery, and another who didn’t care if he ever set foot in Faerie again?

  Mal wanted his old life back. All of it.

  David turned on the machine, fiddling with the dials. “Do you feel anything?”

  “No. Come on, Dafydd bach. It’ll be awkward for Alun, begging a favor of the Queen, but you can talk him into it. You can talk him into anything with a flutter of those eyelashes and a wiggle of that perfect arse.”

  Instead of rising to the bait, David took Mal’s right hand in both of his, his brow furrowing and his eyes losing focus. Mal felt the bone-deep heat that signaled David’s achubydd powers and jerked his arm away.

  “Stop it. Alun would kill me if I let you waste your essence on me.”

  David grabbed his hand again. “I’m not wasting it. I’m not giving you any more than a boost.” He opened Mal’s crabbed hand and pressed the fingers wide and flat. “Push back.”

  “I told you, I—”

  “Damn it, Mal. Push back. As much as you’d like to think there’s a magic bullet for this, there’s not. One way or another, you have to put in the effort, just like any other wounded veteran.”

  Heat burst under Mal’s sternum at the unfairness of David’s words, and he leaned forward. “I—”

  “There! You did it. You pushed back.”

  Mal stared at his hand, the heat dissipating under a flare of hope. “I did?”

  “Absolutely. See? Human PT, plus a little achubydd special sauce, and you can make progress. But you have to do the work.”

  This work is shite. I want my old work. A position backed by the full tradition of Faerie. Mayhem sanctioned by the Queen. Magic as full and easy as breathing. Men who fell to his charm as easily as his enemies fell to his sword. Why was it that the one time he’d done a selfless thing, he’d gotten everything stripped away from him?

  Right, then. Lesson learned: screw self-sacrifice. And as for taking the high road to recovery? Bollocks to that. He’d find an easier way.

  He always had.

  “You know what? Never mind. I’ll figure this out on my own.” He jerked his right arm, dislodging the machine contacts, and surged out of the chair.

  “Mal—”

  “You two can let yourselves out. And take that infernal contraption with you. I never want to see it again.”

  Ignoring David’s wide-eyed hurt, he threw open the gods-be-damned triple-glazed French doors and stalked across the fecking reclaimed concrete patio toward the wetlands, his empty beer bottle still clutched in his hand.

  Bryce MacLeod stoppered the last water sample and carefully settled the test tube into the rack in his satchel. He’d run the preliminary tests in his home lab before he shipped them off for official analysis, but they were bound to be perfect—all the beneficial microbes in place, water quality well within the standards he’d specified when the reclamation project began four years ago.

  The preservation of the wetlands and the adjacent woods, named in his grandmother’s honor, were the result of years of environmental activism and fundraising. He knew it was fanciful, not fitting an environmental studies professor, but he swore he could almost feel the fragile ecosystem knitting around him, the scents of plants in each appropriate stage of growth and decay, the buzz and whine of insects, the chirp and flutter of birds, the sunlight glinting off the water under the reeds.

  He remembered how he’d cried as a boy when his grandmother had told him there were no wild honeybees in Oregon anymore, that they’d been killed off by a mite introduced by an illegal import of infected specimens. That, along with the love of the land she’d instilled in him before her death when he was barely twelve, had shaped his life, his career.

  He sighed. His sabbatical had been ideal for finishing up this project, but it had sucked big time when it came to his social life—not that he had much of one anyway. Being a Myers-Briggs one hundred percent introvert pretty much guaranteed that. But at least when he was teaching, he spoke with other professors, interacted with his students, had a reason to get out and exercise his vocal chords and practice his minimal social skills. Now that the majority of the labor on the wetlands was completed and he was no longer managing work crews, he’d turned into a virtual hermit. It was rather disquieting how much that suited him.

  “Probably start talking to myself next,” he muttered to the Steller’s jay perched on the branch of a nearby crabapple.

  He made his way along the berm that cut a wandering path through the wetlands, carefully designed to allow access without disturbing any plants or habitat. He slowed when he rounded a clump of thimbleberry to see a blue heron standing in the shallows amid the cattails. He hunkered down in the shade, hardly daring to breathe as the bird dipped its bill into the water. So beautiful.

  He’d been waiting for a moment like this since he’d begun lobbying for the project.

  He caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye and turned to see an emaciated coyote approaching through the underbrush. Bryce didn’t want to do anything to drive the heron from the area, but he didn’t want it to fall victim to the coyote either. He straightened, hand reaching out to rattle the thimbleberry branches, when a beer bottle rocketed across the water and struck the coyote in its washboard ribs.

  The heron flapped away, squawking its distress, as the coyote bolted for the woods. Bryce whirled in time to see his surly next door neighbor—Kendrick, M., according to the tag on the mailbox—standing ankle-deep in the slough, laughing like a loon. Under Bryce’s stunned gaze, the bastard actually fist-pumped the sky as if he’d thrown a winning touchdown pass.

  Bryce considered himsel
f an even-tempered guy, the quintessential mild-mannered professor, but anger at his irresponsible neighbor boiled up under his sternum. He stalked over to the spot where the bottle had struck the coyote. Luckily, it hadn’t shattered, so he fished it out of elbow-deep water. If he hadn’t been afraid of damaging the fragile biosphere, he’d have sloshed straight through the water, slashing the reeds out of his path. Instead, he continued along the berm, his fury building with each step.

  Marching straight up to the idiot on the bank, who was grinning as if bashing a starving animal entitled him to a medal, Bryce brandished the bottle under Kendrick, M.’s nose.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I could have you arrested for littering, let alone endangering the ecosystem. This is a protected site.”

  Kendrick blinked as if he hadn’t even noticed Bryce’s presence. He probably hadn’t. Men this handsome never did. And this man was definitely in the top one percent of male beauty, with his square jaw, cleft chin, and model-worthy cheekbones. Stylishly overlong dark hair waved across his forehead and curled against the collar of his snug white T-shirt. At six three, Bryce wasn’t short, but Kendrick topped him by a couple of inches, and his shoulder width and upper-body definition marked him as someone who wrestled with more than test tubes and sloppy undergraduate lab notebooks.

  Kendrick’s grin didn’t falter. “Did you see that? I nailed him. I never thought—”

  “Yes, I saw.” Shit. The guy had a killer British accent too, a weakness of Bryce’s that he blamed on too much Masterpiece Theatre as a kid. Be strong. “I saw you purposely flinging dangerous refuse at a starving animal. What if the bottle had broken? The glass could have injured dozens of fauna. The health of this whole area is very precarious. We’ve only just—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Kendrick held up one hand, palm out, angling his body so that his other arm was hidden. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “The rules about the wetlands and woods are clearly spelled out in the CCRs.”

  “‘CCRs’?”

  “Codes, covenants, and restrictions. The by-laws for the whole development.” He tore off his hat, bunching it in his fist, and flipped up his clip-on sunglasses, the better to glare. “We’ve got a zero-tolerance policy for environmental negligence, let alone intentional pollution. It’s in the papers you signed when you bought the house.”

  Kendrick shrugged his wide shoulders. “A little behind on my reading. Like I said. Sorry.” His tone of voice belied the words.

  “I suggest you catch up, because we also have a zero-tolerance policy for ignorance.” Bryce pulled a notepad out of the pocket of his vest. “Since I’m on the board of the homeowners’ association, I’m reporting you.”

  “Do your worst.”

  “There’ll be a fine.”

  “Yeah?” Kendrick’s grin was nearly feral. “Don’t expect me to pay.”

  “Then we can put a lien on your house. Foreclose. And you’ll be out before you can do irreparable damage.”

  “Flaming abyss, man, will you calm down? You’ve got a bigger stick up your arse than my self-righteous brother.” He flicked a finger at Bryce’s vest. “Fishing’s forbidden in your holy wetlands. I do know that much. How do you justify that to your fellow inquisitors?”

  Bryce’s hands twitched, and he resisted the urge to pat his vest pockets. “It’s not a fishing vest. It’s a tactical vest.”

  Kendrick smirked. “I suppose those are tactical pants.”

  Bryce raised his chin. The pants with built-in kneepads (and more pockets) were practical, but not exactly man-magnet material. He looked like what he was—a science geek. “As a matter of fact, they are. Very useful in fieldwork.”

  “I’m sure. What’s next? Tactical underdrawers?”

  “I didn’t buy any of those.”

  Kendrick barked a laugh. “Shite. You mean they actually make them?”

  “Yes, but I don’t need them for my purposes.”

  “If your purpose is being a nosy parker, you’ve got it nailed, mate.” He yanked the dripping bottle out of Bryce’s hand. “I’ll put this in the bleeding recycling, shall I?”

  “Glass,” Bryce grumbled, wiping his hand on his pants.

  “I know it’s glass. I don’t drink beer out of a flaming paper cup.”

  “I mean you have to recycle glass separately from other waste. You always throw everything in the same bin. I should have reported you for that infraction already.”

  “What are you, the bloody trash police? Why didn’t you, then?”

  Bryce didn’t have a good answer for that, not one that he wanted to share with Kendrick anyway. He couldn’t exactly say I’ve been sorting it for you because I liked watching you walk out to the curb and bend over the bins. It had seemed a fair trade. But now that he’d had a chance to talk to the man, the bloom was off that algae.

  “Maybe I wanted to be neighborly. Unlike some.”

  Gwydion’s bollocks, and I thought Alun was a prig. Mal’s irate neighbor had him beat to flinders. Under the man’s self-righteous glare, Mal’s elation over discovering his left hand was good for something faded completely away. Shite, he’d done the bloke a favor—he’d nailed that Unseelie redcap who’d been about to piss in the water to paralyze the heron before it ate the stupid bird raw.

  Still, Mal supposed he had to cut the guy some slack. The redcap was undoubtedly cloaked in glamourie. Before Mal had been deprived of most of his fae abilities, he could have easily perceived both the illusion and the reality. Now, since he could no more detect glamourie on others than he could cast one on himself, he had no idea how the blasted assassin had appeared to human eyes. Probably as something totally inoffensive, fluffy, and cute, so Mal looked like a sociopath.

  Just fecking brilliant.

  “Look. We’ve obviously got off on the wrong foot. I’m Mal. You are . . .?”

  The man crossed his arms over his chest. “Not amused.”

  “I got that. Thanks.” The bloke wasn’t bad looking, although he wasn’t the sort Mal usually hooked up with. Taller, for one thing—and he’d never had a man other than his brothers frown at him that way. He offered the best grin he could conjure under the circumstances. “Another chance maybe?”

  Neighbor-bloke’s chest lifted in a sigh. “All right. Dr. MacLeod . . . er . . . that is, Bryce.”

  Without thinking, Mal held out his right hand. Bryce extended his, ready to shake, but then his eyes widened behind his black-framed glasses. Shite. Mal snatched his crabbed hand behind his back, the pity in Bryce’s face making him want to bite something.

  “Anyway. Sorry about the bottle and the . . . what was that thing I hit?”

  The pity faded under a look of disbelief, bordering on contempt. Much better. Anything was better than pity.

  “A coyote. Don’t they have those in . . . England, is it?”

  Oh, if only you knew, boyo. “Wales, actually, but it’s been a long time.” A very long time. He brandished the bottle. “Anyway, I’ll take care of this, shall I? Nice to meet you, Bryce. Cheers.”

  He trudged up the hill and through the shady path between their houses to where his refuse containers stood outside the garage. Bryce was watching him from the corner of his patio, a scowl still bunching his eyebrows.

  Mal held the bottle up between two fingers, placed it in the bin labeled Glass, then bowed in Bryce’s direction. Ha. Just as he thought—a smile on those lips made all the difference.

  Maybe I don’t need to troll the bars for a little action after all.

  The next morning, Bryce had recovered from his less-than-pleasant introduction to Kendrick, M. Mal’s curtains were drawn tight as Bryce passed by on his way into the wetlands, so there’d be no encounter with his surly neighbor to spoil his optimistic mood. If today’s water samples were as clean as yesterday’s, he could officially report the project ready to move to maintenance mode.

  He took the alternate way through the slough this morning, past the succession pools that
were part of the housing development’s water conservation and reclamation infrastructure. The morning sun glinted off the water, turning the chevron wake of a trio of ducks peach against the dark water.

  He loved this whole community, proof that environmentally sound building practices could be beautiful and functional as well as planet-friendly. His grandmother would be so proud of what her legacy had produced.

  He took a detour off the berm and into the woods to check on the progress of a family of bluebirds that had moved into the nest box he’d mounted in a bitter cherry tree in the spring.

  For a few minutes he paused, soothed by the bluebirds’ song, the chirrup of chipmunks, and the hum of mason bees in the lupines. Yes, all the work had been worth it.

  He turned back, ready to jump the stream that fed into the slough, when a glint of silver in the reeds caught his eye.

  Damn it. Mal had better not have been tossing trash in here again.

  Bryce crouched down, parting the knife-edged cattail fronds. A trout was floating belly-up at the edge of the water.

  His breath sped up, heat shooting up his throat. Calm down. This could be the heron’s abandoned kill from yesterday. Doesn’t have to be a setback—or evidence of Mal Kendrick’s malice. He edged along the berm, peering down through the reeds, and spotted a second dead fish, a third, a fourth.

  This time, the blood rushed out of his head, and he had to sit down and hunch forward over his knees. This cannot be happening. Just yesterday, the water quality had been perfect. Had an unexpected source of pollution leached into the water? Something upstream in one of the feeder creeks or a failure in the reclamation fields?

  Examining the dead fish at this point wouldn’t tell him anything since their internal organs decayed so quickly after death. Pulling on a pair of disposable gloves from his satchel, he removed the pathetic little corpses from the reeds, dug a shallow trench in the soft ground under the thimbleberries, and buried them. He ought to search for a live affected fish to collect for a necropsy. Later. Not now.

  Instead, he retrieved a water sample from the site, and another from further along, near where a creek emptied into the slough. He was about to head back into the woods to check further upstream when he saw Mal standing knee-deep in the water in the same spot where he’d tossed his bottle yesterday.