It had to be Mal. She sensed his restless energy coupled with the intense focus in the drawings. It gave her yet another intriguing view of the master of the house. No matter his harsh worldview or practicality, down here he was willing to entertain a more fanciful view of his charges, of a wondrously playful and different kind of world. She thought the surroundings encouraged it, warm and dark like a mother’s womb, where everything was still possible.
Now she was about to enter the intimate sleeping quarters of the unpredictable male vampire who was caretaker for her children. Most beings, even vampires, left clues to themselves in the places they slept, coupled and felt most secure. Mal didn’t seem the type who knew what fear or insecurity was, though. Maybe Kohana was right—a coffin in the back would be just as appropriate, and she’d find nothing in here of note but a bed and a line of muddy boots.
He was hard to pin down, that was for certain, but she had to admit, not only from Kohana’s grumbling, he was one of the more nonegalitarian of his kind she’d ever met. In some ways, he reminded her more of Dev than Danny. Except when those eyes sharpened on her. Then she felt that same thing Danny possessed, in spades, the quality that could fluster Elisa in such unexpected ways. He was right; she wasn’t used to feeling it from a male vampire. As unsettling as it could be from Danny, when it came from him it made her knees buckle in a downright embarrassing fashion. She needed to get a handle on herself, and perhaps a greater familiarity with who he was would help with that.
Or make it worse, a sly voice in her subconscious suggested. Ignoring it, she pushed open the bedroom door.
The left corner of the room was a far messier version of his upstairs office. Papers, files and sketches scattered everywhere. As she wandered in, sheets in her arms, she glanced into open boxes that contained reference material and reports that looked like they came from universities, dealing with animal behavior, habitat studies and anatomy. The table in the corner was laden with mostly toppled wooden carvings, all different types of cats. She realized they had distinctive markings, added with markers. Names were scrawled on them, an aid to remembering which cat was which, she assumed.
He had a radio, though she wondered at the reception he might get down here. No pictures, just black-and-white photos of what looked like landscape features of the preserve. They were tacked up on wooden strips embedded in the stone. Turning in a full circle, she faced the right side of the room. And she discovered the most extraordinary bed she’d ever seen.
Carved of some type of black wood, the posts twisted in a natural treelike way up into a canopy of interlaced branches. She expected looking up into it would be like looking up in a forest during winter, when there were no leaves. But hanging from those different branches were sparkling things. Drawing closer, she saw they were crystals, rough-cut gems, strung together in beaded lengths and woven in and out of the branches, along with feathers, and braided lengths of what appeared to be animal hair. Golden, brown, black, white.
Thrown over the bed was something she also didn’t expect. Animal skins. She recognized the tiger’s pelt from pictures in Thomas’s book, the strikingly rich black and gold markings. Underneath and offset from it was one that, from its size, looked like it should belong to a lion. It was tan with a dark, broad arrow of color forming a pattern upon it. Another coat looked black until she drew closer and saw it was a bitter chocolate brown, with a pattern of faint spots through it. A black leopard, maybe.
As she touched the foot rail, she realized she’d placed her hand over a string of animal teeth. Fangs. The string was mixed with feathers as well, some pretty beads, several stones with sparkling crystal sides. Perhaps the teeth had come from the cats that had belonged to these coats, though the size of these fangs gave her pause, as she realized these species were roaming loose on the island. But he protected cats. So why would Mal have their skins?
Putting down the linens, she crossed from the foot to the side of the large bed and closed her hand on the tiger skin. Pulling it back, she discovered it was heavier than she expected. However, the smoothness of it coaxed her to stroke the stripes. Following the pattern made her dizzy, so she closed her eyes, inhaled the animal odor. Not unpleasant, but with her eyes closed, it was as if she were inhaling the creature as it crossed her path, real . . . alive. She could almost feel its back brushing under her fingertips, the chuff of its breath as it passed into the camouflage of a jungle of tall green bamboo, using Nature’s magic to become invisible to the human eye.
She realized then that she was humming. No, not humming. It was a wordless chant, like the Aborigines might craft. It had a soothing power that had her swaying along with it. But she didn’t know any songs like this. It startled her enough to shake her out of the spell.
“Stop daydreaming,” she chided herself, since Mrs. Pritchett wasn’t here to do it. Folding back the skins, since she was reluctant to take them completely off the bed, she retrieved the clean linens.Tucking the bottom sheet in, she smoothed it, circling around the bed to do the other side. As she worked it to the bottom corners underneath the heavy array of pelts, the fur tickled her forearms, the creases of her elbows. She pulled the sheets taut, since one should be able to bounce a coin on a properly made bed, but it was a wide bed, and the mattress was not the typical flat surface. The stuffing was thick and gave invitingly under hands. She didn’t feel a hint of springs. Curious.
She wrestled the top sheet into place, but wasn’t entirely satisfied with the look of it. The sheet had a faint stripe pattern, after all, and it needed to be straight. She didn’t want Malachi to come to his bed thinking it hadn’t been made up right. Of course, from what she’d seen of him, she thought it more likely a bedbug would notice and complain before Mal did. She tripped over the toes of several pairs of boots that had been carelessly deposited under the bed and grimaced. If she was Kohana, she’d chase him out of the house like Mrs. Pritchett until he learned to leave those muddy boots at the door, or clean them properly before coming in.
The idea of chasing the formidable vampire with a broom gave her a smile. Warmed by that, she put a knee on the bed and crawled her way to the middle of its vast expanse, using her hands to straighten and smooth.
She had to catch her breath, so she sat down on her hip, studying the skins as she pulled them forward enough that they lay on her lap. Tiger, lion, leopard. Giving in to her curiosity and desire, she bent her head, rubbed her cheek over the lion skin. She wondered if Mal’s house cats came down here to sleep with him. The mousers at the station were wild as dingoes and not given to being petted or coddled the way it appeared Mal’s were with their sprawling indolence. That fat lot definitely weren’t mousers. Though with an island full of predators, she expected they didn’t have much of a rodent problem.
Her eyes were closing again. It was ridiculous, how often she seemed to want to sleep. At home, she could resist it. Something about this room, deep in the earth, called a body straight into the arms of a nap. It was like the heartbeat of an old woman, sitting by a fire, rocking, that chant coming to her lips again. Elisa moved with it, swaying, her body sinking into the bedding, curling around the animal skins and gathering them in to her. Drowsily, she wondered what that old woman was chanting, and why it felt so natural to join her. It was a great comfort to be part of that rhythm, part of that heartbeat here, deep in the earth. She never had to leave. She could stay here, everything else stopping so that it didn’t matter if she stayed here for eternity. Time would stop as long as she was in the center of this place, this moment.
Fanciful thoughts, nothing like her usual practical thinking. But then, nothing was usual anymore, was it? A young maid in a rich man’s house, who worked hard and let him have his way to keep the job . . . That was usual. A maid who worked for a vampire and played babysitter to six vampire children . . . That required a different way of thinking, right? The world was a daft place, far more unexpected than it first seemed.
She was in a forest, the earth cool beneath her feet. The thin air told her she was higher up, in the mountains, only they were much greener than those in her part of Australia. Hearing a chirp, she looked up to see a large cat studying her from a tree. A beautiful grayish brown creature with enormous eyes like molten gold. She had long white whiskers and touches of white on her chin and face.
Cougar. Or mountain lion. Kohana had said they chirped, right? The female cat jumped down and stalked over to her, but Elisa felt no need to run. The creature rubbed her face on her skirts, marking, and Elisa heard her purr.
The cougar is the largest of the purring cats . . .
That was Thomas’s voice, for he sat in a tree nearby, reading his book, the filtered sunlight flashing off his glasses and obscuring his eyes.
Elisa’s hand fell naturally on the cougar’s coat. It didn’t seem right to pet a creature like this. Instead she offered homage through the respectful touch. Then the cat was moving and Elisa was following, no idea where they were going, just knowing she needed to follow. Thomas was gone. A walk became a lope and then a run. She wasn’t in her skirts now. She was astounded to find herself wearing nothing but an animal’s skin. Its head, or rather the top of its skull and a portion of its face, the ears and glittering eyes, formed a headdress for her. The rest cloaked her body and was pinned at her throat with a piece of carved bone to hold it in place. Her nakedness beneath didn’t bother her, because she was coated in soil, cool and damp on her skin, making her smell like and be a part of the cougar’s world.
She ran so sure and fast, right behind the cougar’s ground-eating lope. They went up and up, until abruptly they emerged on a precipice. Elisa stopped, her breath catching in her throat. The moon hung low and heavy in the sky, so large that the cougar was outlined by it as she propped her feet on a knoll and settled down on her belly, letting out a long yowl.
“Oh my . . .” Elisa let out a delighted noise as that yowl was answered. From a hundred different throats came roars and grumbles, growls and high mewling calls like her companion. Looking down over the precipice, she saw the whole island stretching out below her, much larger and wider than it had appeared on the plane. A faint bluish light ran through the island like veins. She could feel the pulse of it like heat on her skin, and there was a pressure to it, a sense that it was aware of her, shaping itself to her form, learning her and making her part of it, tying her into it, so no matter where she went, that magic would always recognize her . . . or could call her back to it if she got lost.