With that, she grabs my hand, and leads me towards the back door. Her step is just a little too hurried, and almost certainly forcibly slower than she wants to move. All I can think was raid raid raid blaring like a siren in my head. The Witchfinders were coming, and if they caught us, I knew we would wish we were dead.

I quickly lost my sense of direction in the rabbit warren of back alleys she led me through. But even on the rare occasion we crossed a major road, we saw no one. As we move silently through the dark, she slowly speeds up, until we are half running when we are some distance from the bar.

Gunnr stops so suddenly in front of me that I half fall into her. Almost as quickly, she turns, and pushes, and suddenly I am up against a wall. She stares up at me in the darkness, and giggles, but the sound never reaches her eyes, which are as serious as the grave. Her hands come up, and cup both my cheeks and she stands on tiptoe to stretch up towards me. Her lips brush the side of my face, and I feel, more than hear,

“They’re here.”

Every part of me froze in that second, my spine as stiff as an iron bar. For a moment I stopped breathing. Her hands are still against my cheeks, and I know that when she removes them, there would be little half moons left behind from the firmness with which she gripped me. I stare down into her face which was trying for lightness but failing ever so slightly, and cannot help the way my power rises inside me to lip at the edges of the fear that boils off her in waves. It is sharp and sweet and sits heavy on my tongue. Under different circumstances, it would have been a meal fit for the gods. There was something about it, the strength not only of the emotion, but of the woman herself. It is heady and intoxicating, and stood her apart from the mass of humanity more than any other feature. It made me wonder, for a breathless second, whether her demeanor in the bar had been more purposeful than I first thought. After all, she knew what I was, so it would not be too great a stretch to suppose that she knew the flavour of my nature as well. To hide the one thing that made her shine like a beacon to all my senses was a masterful move if so.

Her arms wind up and around my neck, and she leans into me. I can almost feel her heart hammering in time with the pulse of her fear she is so close. Even on tip toe, she barely reaches my shoulders so she pulls me down. And in an instant, that wave of emotion, the fear that sat silky like honey on the tongue, washes over me. Her lips touch mine, chaste but firm, and in a moment I feel like I could have drunk her dry of all that beautiful, sweet fear. But I don’t, I almost can’t. I am too fixed on the feeling, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end, knowing the eyes are on us looking for any sign that we are more than Gunnr was desperately trying to make us appear, just two drunken plainfolk sharing a kiss in an alley. But it is hard, so hard not to drink down her fear. To do so would leave us defenceless, steal her focus and leave her foggy in the wake of such intense emotion, and I did not doubt the surge of my power would be identifiable even to a Witchfinders nose.

We stood like that for what felt like an eternity, but must have only looked like mere moments from the outside. Returning the kiss is hard, if only for the strength it takes not to lose control. I cannot help the way my hands wind in her hair though, or the way the kiss she lays at one corner of my lips makes my heart hammer for an entirely new and different reason than the threat of any poxy Witchfinder.

Finally she drops back onto her heels, balancing one hand against my chest. She cocks her head for a moment, with the barest of smiles.

“Sorry about that,”

She seizes my hand, before I can even embarrass myself by babbling some nonsense response about not worrying about it, and about how I actually enjoyed it. Off we go again, twisting down thin alleys. I am sure we had doubled back at some point, but my sense of direction is absolutely muddled by the time she draws to a stop again. We are standing in the shadow of an old house on a wide road. It had been a bit of a shock after the rabbit warren of narrow paths, to pop out onto such an exposed street. Pausing for a moment to catch her breath, Gunnr raises a hand and places her palm flat against the aged, peeling painted wood of the front door of what looks for all the world like an abandoned and dilapidated old manor home. There is a beat where nothing happens. Not that I truly expected anything to happen. After all, she only placed her hand on the door, she didn’t knock, didn’t try the knob. I stand in the darkness beside her and pant. And then the door budges; yawning inwards like it has been pushed open by a big invisible hand.

Oh, I think, too truly exhausted and mind numb from the events of the evening to muster much surprise, that’s different.

Gunnr looks back over her shoulder at me.

“Moment of truth, I suppose. You first,”

She shifts out of the doorway, which hangs open invitingly. The hallway beyond the faded door does not match the exterior. The carpet is lush and thick and deep red, and the walls are lined with a mixture of paintings and photographs. Not run down, maybe a little dated but very well kept. And warm, a nice change from the chill outside.

I have no idea what ‘moment of truth’ she is referring to, but I take a step forward anyway. I feel a buzz of sorts, just behind my eyes, like there are pleasant fuzzy bees bumbling around the backside of my eyeballs, as I step through the doorway. The feeling disappears in an instant, and I barely have a moment to register it leaving before a bell tinkles somewhere in the depths of the house, and a head pops out of a room at the other end of the hall.

Gunnr steps in behind me, and the door closes obligibly on its own.

“Annie,”

The first real, relaxed smile I had seen from Gunnr passes in that moment, as she greets the blonde woman who comes towards us down the hall. In any other circumstances, I would have called this newcomer small, but beside the woman I had come here with she looked a veritable giant. Annie looks more concerned, smiling but with a little furrow between her brows, and hands fussing in a mess of twisted, anxious fingers.

“It’s starting, isn’t it? You should have let me go, you know they wouldn’t have stopped me.” Annie steps forward, hands fluttering like nervous butterflies skimming just over the surface of Gunnr’s arms as she visibly inspects the other woman top to toe. The action may have been condescending coming from anyone else, but the little blonde makes the action both endearing and earnest. She is scared, I cam taste that as surely as I had tasted Gunnr’s fear earlier. News travelled fast, and I feel probably started here in this house before it ever reached me and my bar full of patrons.

“Even if they had,” she continues, “They would have let me pass by. I’m nothing to them but someone ordinary out after dark.”

The smaller woman does not seem to mind the fussing. She waves it off with a hand, but there was no irritation in it. Clearly this is normal behaviour from all concerned.

“It doesn’t matter now. If you want to fuss, it’s Tall and Allie you should be worried about; they agreed to do the run into the centre.” She nabs a hand as it flutters past her elbow, “Just relax, Annie. We will have plenty of people to worry about here soon, so best save the energy for then.” Gunnr pats the hand gently, and Annie struggles visibly to take a hold of herself, letting out a long shaky breath.

“Our first guest is here anyway, and I have to talk to Tall before he goes. Show him around and get him settled.” Gunnr looks over at me for a second, and her nose wrinkles,

“This is, er?”

I realised, in that moment, that she either did not know my name, or was giving me an out. I went by a nickname at the bar, which she should have known given how often she frequented. However, my true name was not something I went about announcing to the world, and certainly would not be doing here.

“Dell,”

I smile, and hold out a hand to Annie, who clasps it warmly with absolutely no hesitation. It is the first time she had truly turned her attention on me, and I am surprised at just how human she feels. Even next to the woman I thought of as the master of nondescript, vanilla humanness, she seemed a plain, unmagical Jane. But she did not falter when she reached out to touch me, nothing was forced or hesitant in her manner at all. Her smile, when she gave it, was radiant and had the visceral effect of feeling the same as if she had enfolded you in a hug.

This was not a woman who did not realise she was touching a monster. This was a woman who realised, accepted and just didn’t care. Monster or no, she was damn well going to welcome the hell out of me, if that’s what Gunnr wanted. This was a very strange house.

“Dell, come with me, we will get you settled and leave Six to her business.”

I was confused for a moment, before realising she must mean the woman I knew as Gunnr. I recalled vaguely that she had told me that was the name on her papers, but maybe she, like myself, collected names the same way some people collected stamps.

Gunnr - Six - gave me a pinched smile that was still more than a little worried round the edges. But she let Annie tow me away down the hallway with no objection. Before we rounded the far corner of the hallway, I looked back for a moment and saw her disappear into one of the first doors on the left, and couldn’t help the shiver that ran up my spine for a moment. It may have been the stress of the evening catching up with me, but I felt like she tilted her chin to look up far above where a normal person, even a tall one would have stood.

This was a very strange house indeed.