A touch of pink washed across her cheekbones. She nodded, then looked around. “This is a very large space, and I don’t know where to go from here.”

“This is the great hall,” he said. “It would have been used for formal occasions, to receive important visitors, and for the whole household to eat together. It looks fairly barren right now with all the stone, but there would have been tapestries hanging all along the walls to give them color and help hold in the warmth.”

“They must have taken the tapestries when they left,” Sophie said, staring around her.

“There might be some tapestries still hanging elsewhere,” he told her. “With a manor house of this size, there will be private rooms, a family sitting area or drawing room, which was sometimes called a solar, and bedrooms, a kitchen, pantry, a buttery, smoke room, a larder, servants’ quarters, possibly an inner courtyard, and the Shaw family clearly had wealth and education, so I suspect there’ll be a library, a chapel, and even an armory.”

She blew out a breath. “All that.”

“Yes. All that. This didn’t shelter just a family household. It housed an entire small community.”

The hall itself looked to be in surprisingly good shape. The roof didn’t appear ready to collapse. Above, a balcony ran the length of the hall, where people could gather to watch events below. He could see a hint of shadowed hallways between stone arches. If the house was like other manor houses of the time, they would lead to the private family rooms.

There was a massive stone fireplace at one end of the great hall, big enough for a man of Nikolas’s height to stand upright inside. It had been swept clean when the family had left, but a shadow from the fires stained the stone.

He stepped inside and craned his neck to try to see up the chimney, but it was too dark to see past a few feet. It was possible something could have nested in the crevice. Could there be any creatures living inside the house? How would they exist, and what would they have fed on? He could always light a fire to find out.

All in all, the hall looked plenty big enough to hold eight men who were used to living in rough conditions. It was thick with dust but dry, with no sign of stains or mold, and with modern camping gear, they could actually make it pretty comfortable. Propane stoves should work. They weren’t technologically complex enough to stop working around the magic of Other lands. Basically all one did was open a valve to release the gas, light it, and set it under a grill. And the fireplace itself might be viable.

So, they could have shelter immediately and explore the rest of the house at their leisure. They could cook. They needed a clean water source and a latrine. Camping gear, firewood, and a big enough supply of food to last them through a lengthy siege, if necessary.

It was doable. The setup would be relatively primitive, but it was defensible, and eminently doable.

When he stepped out of the fireplace and looked around, Sophie was nowhere in sight. “Hey!” he called out sharply. “I thought we agreed this house wasn’t safe. No disappearing! Where are you?”

Quick, light footsteps sounded in the hall off to his left, and she stepped into view. “I didn’t go far,” she said. Her eyes had gone wide again. “Just down the hall a little way. Nikolas, there’s a shift about twenty feet down the hall.”

He strode rapidly over to her, still feeling irritated that she had gone out of sight. “You didn’t step into it, did you?”

“No! Oh, no.” She shuddered. “I don’t think anybody should go off by themselves in here. Kathryn said there was a pair of children who disappeared for weeks. When they reappeared again, they were dirty and starved and babbling about strange things.”

He rested his hands on his hips as he looked down the hall. “We need to map out the house and mark off where the shifts occur.”

“Yes!” When he turned his attention back to Sophie, her eyes had lit up. “We need different colored chalk or better yet, paint. The great hall can be the green zone. Down there can be the red zone.” She waved her hands in the air. “The colors don’t matter. I’m just being random. Then the next zone can be blue, and yellow, and orange, and so forth. When we have a floor plan, we can draw in the zones and see if we can detect any patterns.”

“And because we don’t know what happens when you cross from one zone to the next, nobody goes exploring alone,” he told her.

She cocked her head and angled her jaw out. “Who owns this house again?”

“Sophie,” he snapped. “This isn’t worth arguing over. It doesn’t matter if you own the house. Don’t risk your life over it.”

She blew out a breath. “Okay. Okay! This one time you happen to be right. It’s the law of averages. Eventually you were going to be right at some point, but really, you shouldn’t expect that to happen again now for years and years—”

There was only one way he knew of to shut her up. He grabbed her by the wrist, hauled her against his chest, and as she oofed at the impact and laughed, he snaked his other hand around the back of her neck and kissed her.

This time there was no surprise or uncertainty. He knew what to expect, and it happened. Like striking a match, sexuality flared to life and shot along all his nerve endings. Her plush, full lips were still trembling with laughter.

He ate it all down. He devoured her, greedily. His cock stiffened into a painful hard spike of desire, while she slipped her arms around his waist, molded her body to his, and kissed him back. She met him, greed for greed, ragged breath for breath. He had never felt so alive, so connected.