Hounded: By the Fae's Fated Mate (The North Shore Fae Book 1) by A.S. Green

Author:A.S. Green [Green, A.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Collinwood Publishing, LLC
Published: 2022-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

18

CORMAC

It was late. The sky was dark, but the moon was bright and looking larger than normal. Cormac stood just inside the gate on the stone walkway in front of his childhood home with his mate by his side. A mate he still had not mated, as the hound perpetually reminded him. What would his father have thought of that?

He couldn’t think about that now. He had vowed, half a century ago, never to return until he had avenged his family—a head for a head—and though the most imminent threat had fallen, he could not claim the kill as his own.

How could he break his vow, go inside when it had not yet been fulfilled? His hands balled into fists. “I shouldn’t have come. This was a mistake.”

“If that’s true,” Meghan said, her face lifted in awe toward the turret, “it’s a very large mistake, now isn’t it?”

He turned to her in surprise. “You can see the house?”

She looked up at him in confusion. “Is there some reason why I shouldn’t?”

“The house’s exterior is charmed to make it invisible to humans, but apparently it doesn’t work on halflings.”

Though it hurt to look, Cormac tried to see the large three-storied Victorian manor as Meghan did: that being, for the first time. Its façade was local red sandstone, and its other three sides built of brick. The roof was green slate and the numerous multi-shaped windows reflected the moonlight.

The porch ran across the entire front of the house, then wrapped around the side, and its ceiling created a second-story porch with a wrought-iron balustrade. The last time he’d been on it, he had played marbles with his youngest brother, Madigan.

Cormac gave her a descriptive tour from the front yard. “A library and four large bedrooms upstairs, each with their own baths. As you enter the front door, there’s a sitting room to the right, my mum’s music room to the left, then the hallway and staircase straight ahead. The hall leads to the dining-room and…the kitchen.”

The kitchen.

Grief clenched his heart as the memory of his parents’ slaughter weakened his knees. A raindrop hit him on the cheek, then another on his hand.

“Are we going in?” Meghan asked. “Or were you being serious before?”

A few more drops pelted his face in rapid succession, so he exhaled in surrender and took her hand. Together they strode up the porch steps. He took a key from his pocket and silently opened the front door.

It was dark inside, and he caught his shoulder on a coat hook that hadn’t been there before, but otherwise he didn’t need the lights to know his way through the foyer, past the sitting room on the right.

Muscle memory took him to the top of the stairs. At the top, the hallway ran both left and right. He turned right down the shorter hallway that led to his old bedroom and pushed open the door.

Only then did he flip on a light. He pulled Meghan inside and closed the door gently behind them.

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