Tor (Westerly Cove Book 1)

  Tor

  Westerly Cove #1

  Zoe Chant

  Tor

  Westerly Cove #1

  © 2022 Zoe Chant

  This book stands on its own with a self-contained HEA romance, but this series is a spinoff from Stone Shifters, the series that introduces Westerly Cove and its resident gargoyles and shifters.

  Stoneskin Dragon

  Stonewing Guardian

  Stoneheart Lion (forthcoming)

  Contents

  1. Bernie

  2. Tor

  3. Bernie

  4. Tor

  5. Bernie

  6. Tor

  7. Bernie

  8. Tor

  9. Bernie

  10. Bernie

  11. Bernie

  12. Tor

  13. Bernie

  14. Tor

  15. Bernie

  16. Tor

  17. Bernie

  Epilogue 1: Bernie

  Epilogue 2: Eren

  A note from Zoe Chant

  Also by Zoe Chant

  This book is a love letter to all those pets who aren't cute fluffy fur babies but rather, are demon children who make our lives difficult in all kinds of ways. And yet we wouldn't trade them for the world.

  Bernie

  The first time Bernadette Grady saw the lighthouse on the point, she fell in love.

  She saw it from the road, which looped over the nearly treeless top of the ridgeline. Below her, the ocean sparkled in the sun, and the rumpled green coastline wound in and out. Newfoundland was as gorgeous as she had always heard, and after hours of driving the one road from St. John's, her ability to take on board gorgeous scenery was starting to grow jaded.

  But then she saw the lighthouse.

  It was just like the pictures in the real estate ad that had brought her here. It looked like a lighthouse from a painting, a small white and red tower, sitting at the end of a spur of jewel-green land projecting out into the turquoise-colored sea.

  Nothing Bernie had ever seen in her life was so beautiful.

  She was so busy gazing at the lighthouse that she almost missed the turnoff. It was unmarked, and she would have thought the narrow dirt road was someone's driveway or maybe even an ATV trail if she wasn't high enough on the hill to see that it wound down through scrubby pines and ended at the cluster of buildings around the lighthouse.

  At that point, her serene appreciation of the view was completely ruined by the demon cat in the backseat, as he tore one scraggly paw halfway out of a carrier that had been sworn by the pet shop clerk in St. John's—hastily purchased after carrier no. 3 was destroyed on the ferry ride from the mainland—to be certified cat-proof, even for a cat that was the unholy offspring of a gremlin and Beelzebub.

  Someone had clearly forgotten to inform Pennywise, the cat, who had somehow gotten another paw free in the two seconds it took Bernie to tear her eyes away from the lighthouse and look with horror into the backseat. The soft-sided carrier, which the pet shop guy had sworn was reinforced "like Kevlar," now had two paws sticking out of holes on different sides, and it was hopping slowly sideways across the patched, tattered, cat-hair-plastered seat.

  Bernie said a word that would have made Grandma Somers reach for the soap and slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road.

  Fortunately there was no one behind her. The road had been deserted ever since she turned off the main highway from St. John's onto the winding ribbon of back-country side road that led to Westerly Cove. She threw the car into park and hurled herself over the cat-clawed back of her seat just as the frantically hopping carrier slammed into the passenger side door.

  She had to stop him before he actually, somehow, in defiance of all odds, managed to get the door open and hopped away across the heather and right over the cliff plunging down to the ocean. It should have been impossible for a cat to open a car door, but Pennywise, somehow, perhaps through sheer rage at being thwarted in his escape plans, had managed to do it not just once but three times, and one of those times had been in Vancouver rush-hour traffic.

  He had also pressed the button to roll down the car windows enough times that she was pretty sure he knew what it was actually for, in the same way that he had long since mastered the fine art of destroying window screens. It wouldn't have surprised her to learn that he was figuring out doorknobs.

  Pennywise had been a stray for the first part of his life and did not know the meaning of the words "inside cat."

  Other words he didn't know included "no," "don't scratch that," "bad cat," his own name, and a lot of phrases that began with the word "stop."

  Bernie grabbed the carrier and yelped as a flailing, scruffy paw raked across the back of her hand, joining the other scratches that she had acquired while trying to stuff him into the not-Kevlar carrier this morning.

  "Would you just—freaking—stop," she begged as she sandwiched the carrier securely between two suitcases. An angry warbling noise began. "We're almost there. You've put up with it for days. You can put up with it for another five minutes."

  The warning ululation escalated into a wildcat-like shriek, and there was the distinct sound of both of her pieces of matching luggage, that had belonged to Mom, being systematically shredded by a paw on each side of the carrier. She could see scraps of thread and lint shower down onto the seat.

  "Stop," Bernie said. Tears sprang to her eyes unexpectedly, a great swell of grief rising up over her half-hysterical laughter at once again suffering her cat's tendency to destroy everything near him. "Stop, stop, please stop!"

  Strangely enough, he actually did stop, although she thought it might only be because he was resting up for a fresh assault. However, the paws had withdrawn for now.

  Bernie glanced behind her, but the road still stretched empty. There was no one to observe her stopped in the middle of the road, having a yelling match with her cat.

  "Wow, no one ever comes out here, do they?" she murmured, and cautiously put the car in reverse, as she'd overshot the turn. It went against every one of her city driving instincts, but she slowly backed up until she reached the rutted dirt side road and turned onto it.

  Immediately she nearly gutted her car's oil pan on a rock.

  "Wow," she murmured, and slowed to a near crawl on the descent through the trees. There was no guardrail, and while the trees would probably stop the car from sliding straight over the cliff into the sea, it definitely wouldn't be fun, and she didn't think the town was big enough to have a towing service.

  Driving this road every day would be a major pain, especially in the winter.

  Luckily she didn't intend to.

  Bernie Grady had one plan, and that plan was to shut herself away from the world and never go anywhere ever again if she could help it. The only company she needed—and probably the company she deserved—was her horrible cat.

  There was one other car parked next to the lighthouse when Bernie and the horrible cat pulled in. It was a Range Rover SUV with big tires and a thick coating of mud sprayed across its doors. It was clearly a more practical vehicle for the area than Bernie's small sedan.

  There was a woman standing beside the Range Rover having an argument with a seal.

  Bernie had thought that fighting with her cat was bad. That wasn't really a seal, was it? She knew they lived in the waters around Newfoundland, but this was on top of a cliff. Surely it must be a sort of short ... legless ... dog.

  As Bernie pulled up beside the Range Rover, the woman was bent down with her face close to the seal's. The seal had its mouth open, pushed itself up on its flippers to the furthest extent that a seal's body was capable of (not very far), and appeared to be barking into her face. The woman was also saying something, vehemently fr
om the look of it.

  Then something alerted her—the crunching of tires, probably. She glanced around, looked shocked, and straightened up hastily. Bernie, who was staring, nearly sideswiped the Range Rover. Once she was able to take her eyes off the job of parking and look up again, the seal/dog/mystery creature was humping its plump body hastily away past the lighthouse, and the woman was striding toward Bernie with a clipboard in hand and a firm and businesslike attitude, not at all like she had just been yelling at a seal a minute ago.

  Also, it sounded like the luggage destruction in the backseat had resumed.

  Bernie took a deep breath and opened the door.

  "Hi!" the woman said brightly. She was about Bernie's age—late 20s—and her brown hair was pulled back in a thick, practical braid. She wore knee-high wading boots over her jeans. The hand that she stuck out was sun-browned and callused. "You must be Bernadette. Welcome to Westerly Cove. I'm Wyona, the real estate agent. We've been dealing with each other over the phone."

  This all came out in a rush.

  "Uh—yeah, it's great to meet you in person." Bernie recovered her manners and shook Wyona's hand somewhat absently, looking around for the seal, if it was a seal. "... Was that a seal?"

  Wyona's eyes opened wide. She had very dark brown eyes, her one unusual feature in an otherwise ordinary face; they were almost black. "Did you see the, um—what did you see?"

  "It looked like you were talking to a seal," Bernie said, well aware that it sounded stupid and also, behind her, the car's backseat was yowling fit to raise the dead.

  "Oh, that," Wyona said. "Yes, it's, I, um, we have a population of harbor seals here. They're very tame."

  "Oh," Bernie said blankly. It sounded reasonable, if you hadn't just seen a woman and a seal standing nose-to-nose having what Bernie would have sworn reminded her, from the body language, of a sibling bickering match. "Where did it go?"

  "No idea. They're wild around here. Do you have a cat?" Wyona asked, with the air of a woman desperate to change the subject.

  "No," Bernie said crisply, in defiance of the unmistakable cat-noises coming from the car. "It is a black-souled beast from the abyssal depths of Hell, and it can just wait a few minutes. So this is the lighthouse I just bought?"

  Wyona laughed, and Bernie found herself liking her. "Sight unseen, too! You know, I was hoping you wouldn't have second thoughts when you got here."

  "Not at all," Bernie said fervently.

  In her opinion, the pictures on the real estate website and the ones Wyona had emailed her hadn't done justice to the beauty of the place.

  It was true that up close, the little cluster of white clapboard buildings beside the lighthouse were somewhat run down, their paint peeling and showing gray, weathered wood underneath. The grass had grown up long and weedy around their foundations.

  But what the pictures didn't convey was the headland's sheer wild beauty. There was a constant flow of wind, ruffling the grass in successive waves. The air smelled of late-season wildflowers and a fresh ocean tang.

  The lighthouse itself seemed a bit smaller up close than it had looked from the hill, just a couple of stories tall. There was a catwalk circling the topmost floor, and a red roof that made her think of a little red cap. A chain-link fence surrounded the bottom of the tower, although the gate stood open.

  "When was it last used?" Bernie asked, looking up at it.

  "It was automated until just a few years ago," Wyona explained. "The last lighthouse keeper lived here in the eighties, but they eventually decommissioned everything and put it up for sale. The lighthouse keeper's house is that little white one. I have all the keys."

  "So you don't actually get to live in the lighthouse?" Bernie asked. It was the only disappointing thing so far. Otherwise, everything was exactly perfect. It was just as she had imagined, like a daydream made real.

  "Well, you could if you wanted to, it'd just take a little remodeling," Wyona said, and just like that, her life was complete.

  It was isolated. It was ideal. She couldn't ask for a better place to retreat from the world. It was impossible to get any farther away from Vancouver and still be in North America, unless Bernie went up to the farthest tip of Nunavut or down to the Florida Keys.

  "This is amazing. It's everything I hoped for."

  "I have to admit I was worried you'd get here and change your mind once you saw it in person."

  Bernie shook her head vigorously. "I loved the place the instant I saw it. The more I see, the more I love it."

  "I'm so glad," Wyona said. "You're exactly the kind of person we were hoping would buy it."

  "Who's we?" Bernie asked, abruptly wary. "And what kind of person is that?" She had a worrying vision of a whole town of nosy busybodies, up in her business in every way. That was exactly what she didn't want!

  "Sorry, I just meant that this place needed to be bought by someone who would live here. Someone who would love it as much as the town has always loved to look up and see our lighthouse on the point." Wyona looked up at the red and white tower above them. "Ever since it went on the market, we've had an extremely aggressive big-city developer trying to get their hand on the place to turn it into a tourist attraction."

  Bernie tried to picture the quiet, peaceful place thronging with tourists. The picture was unpleasant. "I guess it would bring jobs," she said uncertainly.

  "No one in town thinks it's worth it." Wyona's voice was firm. "We like our town the way it is. But they refused to take no for an answer, and they kept raising their offer. And no one else seemed to want it. We were thinking we might just have to settle and accept their offer when you contacted me wanting to buy it."

  "I'm glad I could—" Help? That sounded awfully awkward when she was talking about buying a whole entire lighthouse.

  With the sort of mixed blessing that Pennywise had generally provided in her life, the uncomfortable moment was interrupted by a half-mournful, half-furious wail from her car. It was a tone that promised later revenge.

  "Wyona, if you don't mind, is there somewhere I could put my cat? Preferably somewhere inside?" Not that this would stop Pennywise from making a break for it as soon as her back was turned.

  "Of course," Wyona said, switching gears easily. "I'll unlock the caretaker's cottage for you. It's all yours now, of course. You can go into any building you like."

  Bernie went back to the car and got the carrier. She could feel its unruly occupant's weight moving around inside, first one way, then the other. Every once in a while, a gray and white paw swiped at her through one of the holes.

  She carried it at arm's length around the corner to the door, where Wyona was sorting through keys on a key ring.

  "I made sure it was cleaned up for you," Wyona said. "We had a cleaning service come in and spiff it up. There are even clean sheets on the bed, since I didn't know what you'd have with you, and you were going to need a place to sleep after driving out here. The electricity and water are both on. Ah!" The key clicked in the lock. "There you go."

  The door opened onto a small, tidy kitchen. It was nothing special, with aged appliances that clearly hadn't been updated since the '70s at the latest, but right now to Bernie, it looked like heaven. She had to fight down an urge to hug the real estate agent. After all the traveling, it was glorious to have a place to stop.

  "Thank you so much," she said earnestly. "So I can just ... move in?"

  "It's yours. Of course you can. The bathroom is right down that hall; do you want to put your cat there, maybe, and I can show you the rest of the place?"

  "Sure," Bernie said. She had hoped to open the carrier in private, due to the possibility that Pennywise might attack instead of retreat, but if she left him in there any longer, he was definitely going to destroy the thing and get out anyway.

  So she followed Wyona to the bathroom. Like the rest of the cottage, it was small but solidly constructed. Everything was old but well-kept, looking perfectly serviceable.

  Bernie crouched on the
floor and, with practiced ease, aimed the carrier away from herself.

  "You might want to leave," she suggested.

  "Oh, is she shy?"

  "He, and—not really, I mean ..." She sighed a little, because from the ripping sounds inside the carrier, Pennywise was going to be free in a few seconds anyway. "Never mind. If you value your ankles, I suggest standing back."

  "It's okay, the poor thing is probably upset from the drive," Wyona said. "What's his n—holy hairballs."

  She couldn't have had time to get more than a brief look at Pennywise as he shot out of the bathroom past her legs, as if powered by a rocket, and vanished somewhere else in the cottage. But that was enough. It always was, with Pennywise.

  "Yeah," Bernie said, looking at the carrier ruefully. In addition to tearing two cat-leg-sized holes in the sides, Pennywise had completely torn up the interior and, from the look of things, actually chewed partway through the metal mesh covering the front.

  "I wasn't expecting him to be that ... big," Wyona said, staring after him.

  "The vet says he's part Maine coon." Bernie stuffed the carrier under the sink to deal with later. "He was a stray I adopted."

  Or more accurately, a stray who had adopted her, in his awful way, at exactly a time in her life when she needed something to love—even if Penny would have been difficult for most people to love. But she felt that was one reason why she had bonded with him. They were both a little broken. Well, okay, Pennywise was a lot broken, but she cherished him anyway.

  "That's so sweet. What's his name?"

  "Pennywise," Bernie said.

  "Like the clown in—uh—"