Gabrevys entered Toirealach's empty office. The reek of his destroyed spell still filled the air, and it took no Art to know that his prey had escaped. That was unfortunate, and for more reasons than just the obvious. Once summoned, the Soul-eaters must be fed, or else they quickly grew uncontrollable, even for a Magus Major. Apprehension pricked him, but he dismissed it. There was no reason for apprehension at this juncture. It would be a simple enough matter to find them food from among the feckless mortals gathering for the concert if the Bard and his brother could not be recaptured by the time the peu de porte automatically opened a few hours hence, but. . . .
Perhaps it would be best to be prepared.
With a thought, he summoned Jormin, and as he waited, he approached the door that led to the feeding pen and laid his hand against it lightly.
He raised his eyebrows in faint astonishment. The feeding pen was not empty. And now he knew where the two that had been left in the outer office had gone.
Perhaps he had underestimated the temper of Sieur Eric's character. Rather than taking his parents with him, the Bard had left them in the feeding pen, as a sacrifice in his place.
An elegant solution, one worthy of an Unseleighe Prince. Once the Soul-eaters had fed upon them, they would never again be able to make such a covenant with any of the Sidhe as Gabrevys had used against Misthold's Bard on this occasion. Perhaps the Bard was sending another message as well—that just as he would not again be bound by ties of blood, so Gabrevys must look for his own ties of blood to be used against him?
He had not looked for such subtlety from a human. Perhaps apprehension was in order.
He turned slightly, as his underling's presence impinged on his consciousness.
"My lord?" Jormin entered and, quickly sensing his master's mood, knelt and bowed his head.
Gabrevys looked down on him, broodingly. "Sieur Eric and his followers have escaped. Find them and return them here by dawn. Take with you as many of the folk as can be spared from our work here. See to it that the Bard and his cohorts warn no one of what is to come."
"I hear and obey," Jormin said, bowing even lower for just a moment, before springing to his feet and running from the room, as if he was running for his very life. Which was just as well, because, in fact, he was.
With Hosea and Eric covering the rear, and Ace in the lead, the four escapees burst out into the lobby, and with shaking hands, Ace punched the lock-code into the door. They ran out into the night, not caring this time if they were noticed.
But there was more to worry about than the night-shift rent-a-cops. The parking lot was filled with people—
For a moment Eric was stunned at the crowd gathered here in the middle of the night, but then the hasty explanation back in the Grey Room dropped into place:
Free concert. Hundreds of—if not precisely innocent, then certainly uninvolved spectators—were assembling in a potential combat zone. Oh, now wasn't that just what they needed. . . .
People would be arriving hours ahead of time to make sure they got good places.
This was not the time to stand out as running out of a building in a panic.
Right. Now's the time for my favorite "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" number.
With a few bars of "Mr. Cellophane" from Chicago running through his head as the key and foundation (damned useful, that song), Eric quickly cast a spell over the four of them so that they could pass through—or around—the crowd unseen.
But while it would work on the humans gathered here, it wouldn't fool the Sidhe chasing them. Not for one second. The Sidhe invented that "Don't see me" spell, and they knew every counter for it.
And he knew pursuit was right behind them. Gabrevys wouldn't just give up and go home because Eric and Magnus had escaped. If he could get the four of them back before dawn—and back into that room—he'd still have won whatever game he thought he was playing. And without them free to tell what they knew, he'd still be able to carry out the rest of his plans—at least he'd think so.
Eric still wasn't entirely certain what else was supposed to have happened in that room. Except that Gabrevys had seemed awfully certain when he'd left them all there that Ace, Eric, and Magnus would be happy little puppets by dawn. Too bad he must have read the Evil Overlord Checklist; he hadn't stood there and gloated nearly long enough, so Eric was not at all clear on the details. The only thing that he was clear on was that by not only consenting, but asking Gabrevys and his minions to snatch the two of them and turn them into good, obedient, mindless drones, the elder Banyons had completely nullified any protections that Eric's status as a Bard gave him.
Thanks so much, Mom and Dad.
So maybe Gabrevys really would win, if he could get them back in there.
So we just have to make certain that doesn't happen.
They reached the car.
"Whoa—nice wheels," Magnus said shakily, as Hosea unlocked the doors.
"Solid Detroit iron, which is more to the point just now," Hosea said grimly as they all piled in—he and Eric in the front, Magnus and Ace in the back seat. "Might spike their spells a touch." He backed out carefully; the last thing they needed right now was to run over someone. Ace already had her phone out.
"It's dead," she said in frustration.
"Try mine," Hosea said, handing it over.
But by the time Hosea had reached the road, they'd discovered that none of their cellphones worked. Possibly the Grey Room's spells had drained them—technology and magick were an uneasy combination at the best of times.
"Crap," Eric said flatly.
"We'll call Miz Ria from a payphone—" Hosea began, but Ace cut him off.
"Her phones screen out everything that comes from a payphone and sends them to an answering machine. She doesn't check it herself; her secretary does, and that won't be until she comes in at eight!" Ace wailed.
Magnus shook his head. "I don't remember anybody's number," he confessed uneasily. "I just put 'em in the SIM so I won't have to."
"We've got to tell somebody about the bomb!" Ace cried, tossing her phone to the floor in frustration. "You saw all those people back there—and more coming. They're gonna be killed!"
"Do we?" Eric said in a strained voice. "Who do we tell—and what do we tell them?"
They'd gotten out of the business park now, and all of them breathed a little easier, although it didn't mean they were safe, yet, by any means. Eric was turned sideways in his seat, looking back out the car's rear window, but saw no sign of pursuit yet.
Of course, their enemy wouldn't necessarily be so lawabiding as to be using headlights. . . .
"We tell the police," Ace said, looking quite beside herself. "I was right there when Mr. Horn and Daddy planned it all out, and you better believe the police take things like that seriously these days."
"And then Gabriel told you that it wasn't going to be a fake, like he told your father, but a real bomb—when he had you tied up in a back room of Christian Family Intervention waiting to get your brains sucked out by creatures from Underhill," Eric finished for her. "And even if you don't tell them that part—and I think you're smart enough to leave that out—they'd want to know how you came to overhear the first conversation. And even if you had a good answer for that, you're in the middle of suing Billy Fairchild. It doesn't make you a very credible witness."
"So make it an anonymous tip!" Magnus said belligerently. "They'd have to check that out."
"And he'd use magick on any police that showed up," Ace admitted bitterly, after a long pause. "And make them believe anything he wanted them to believe. It wouldn't work, would it?"
Eric nodded.
"Ah 'speckt not," Hosea said regretfully, keeping his eyes fixed on the road ahead. "Then, what do we do, Eric?"
Fortunately, he had an answer for that.
"Ria," Eric said. "We find something that isn't a payphone, and call her on it. Or better yet—call her service and talk to the live person, who will put us through." Fortunately, that was one number he did remember; unlike Magnus, he hadn't lived most of his life with cellphones available. Ria certainly screened her calls—but the service knew him, and he had the right code-phrase that would tell them to put him through. The advantages of having a live person on the other end of the line could be enormous. "Ria will believe us, and she'll be able to make the right people believe her. We just have to get to a phone to call her." One that works. One we can defend for long enough to tell her enough of the details.
"There's a phone back at the hotel . . ." Hosea began doubtfully.
"First place they'll look," Magnus said instantly. "Hey, can't this thing go any faster?"
"It better," Eric said. "I don't think we can take Gabrevys and his Bard both if it comes to a fight. So we've got to stay out of their reach, and warn Ria—and both those things are about equally important."
"Seems to me this'd be a good time to whistle up Lady Day and go see Ria in person," Hosea said, after a moment's thought. He was making random turns, heading south and west, back toward the city proper.
"No," Eric said. "They attacked me while I was riding her before. They might be able to track her."
"So we're stuck?" Ace asked.
"I think if we—Hosea, where are you going?" Eric demanded suddenly.
"Ah . . . Ah don't rightly know," the Ozark bard said, sounding shaken. He applied the brakes and the Cadillac bucked to a sudden halt in the middle of the deserted road.
"Back to the hotel," Ace said, answering Eric's question. "But we shouldn't go back to the hotel . . . should we?"
No. And right now, Eric didn't have time to get to the bottom of the question of why Hosea was going there.
"Let me drive," Eric said. He got out of the car, and Hosea slid over on the wide bench seat without comment.
Driving the pink Cadillac was like navigating a tugboat, especially since most of Eric's recent driving experience had been not only with elvensteeds, but motorcycle-shaped elvensteeds at that. But he got it in gear and took off again.
"We need to get out of the area," Eric said, gathering his thoughts. "They'll expect us to head north, back to our home base, so I'm going south. The Parkway's full of rest stops. The first phone we find, we'll call Ria. Hell, if her phones screen out pay-phones, I'll just buy a damned pay-as-you-go cell and call her from that!" And I'll find out what's wrong with you, he added silently to his Apprentice.
But if the Cadillac handled like a barge, it accelerated like The Millennium Falcon, and by the time they found the on-ramp for the Garden State Parkway South and reached the speed-lane, it was cruising along at a smooth eighty-five. A little Bardic glamour would ensure that they weren't stopped by any troopers, and as for other drivers, at this hour on a Friday morning, south of Atlantic City, the Parkway was just about empty.
For the first time since he'd awakened in the Grey Room earlier that night, Eric began to feel hopeful. There was no chance Big Pink was bespelled—not with all the Cold Iron in her—and it was just possible they'd either managed to outrun their pursuers, or misled them. . . .
"There's some guys behind us," Magnus reported in idle tones. "Looks like bikes. Good time for a run." There was a pause, then he spoke again, sounding worried, "They're coming up awfully fast."
"Eric—" Ace said, alarm in her voice.
Suddenly there was an ear-splitting wail, and every pane of glass in the Cadillac shattered.
Eric flung up an arm to protect his eyes as the wind whipped pebbles of safety glass and shards of mirror around him. Suddenly he was driving blind, with the eighty-five-mile-per wind whipping into his face. But he didn't dare slow down.
Adrenaline thrummed through his veins, as Ace shrieked behind him. He summoned his armor and slammed the visor down—it wasn't as much protection as a motorcycle helmet, but it would have to do.
Eric pushed the pedal all the way to the floor. Automatically he glanced down, but the face of the speedometer was a spiderweb of cracks. They had to be doing over a hundred, though.
Not good enough.
There was a thump on the roof, and a groaning, tearing sound as something began to pull at the roof of the car. There were long, curved black talons hooked around the edge of what had once been the windshield, and Eric thought he'd really rather not see what they were attached to.
Behind him, Magnus was invoking the "F" word at a machine-gun rate and at the top of his lungs.
Now Eric could hear the sound of hoofbeats, even over the sound of the howling engine and the wind.
"Get down!" Eric shouted to the others.
Hosea reached for the wheel, steadying it and freeing Eric's hands. That trick would only work for a few seconds, but a few seconds would have to be enough.
He turned in his seat—the angle was awkward—summoned the 1812 Overture, and blasted the roof with all his might.
It was already weakened. Now it blew free, and took with it whatever had been tearing at it. Eric heard a shriek as their arcane passenger was dislodged, and then more shrieks as the mass of Cold Iron tumbled into the middle of the riders following them.
He turned back and grabbed the wheel from Hosea, yanking the now-convertible back into the middle lane, and jamming the accelerator all the way down again.
"I thought they couldn't touch iron!" Magnus yelled from the back seat. He'd climbed out of the footwell and was looking over the back deck again.
"Some of them can," Eric shouted back. "If they aren't Sidhe." And Gabrevys had apparently come to the World Above prepared for every eventuality.
With three bars from the first thing he could think of, which happened, ironically enough, to be "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," (thank you, Martin Luther!) he flung a shield over the top of the car. It made a poor windshield—it was like looking through a thin bubble of water—but it cut the icy blast of wind and it was better than nothing.
And it would protect them from a levin-bolt, if the riders started firing at them.
There wasn't a lot he could do while he was driving, and while he was willing to risk changing drivers at a hundred miles an hour if he had to, he wasn't sure what Hosea would do once he was behind the wheel. Maybe turn right back the way Gabrevys wanted them to. Maybe stop. Either would be bad.
Hosea had slung Jeanette's strap over his shoulder, and was getting ready to play, but looked uncertain, as if he couldn't think of anything appropriate.
Remind me that I have to increase your repertoire, Apprentice.
"They're coming back," Ace announced. "What can we do?"
"Your power will work on them as well as on humans," Eric said. "If you can think of some way to make them decide to go away, now would be a good time to try it."
Ace gave a strangled hiccup. More than anyone Eric had ever known, Ace hated and feared her Gift.
"Here they come," Magnus said grimly.
The thunder of hoofbeats got louder. Even though they seemed to be riding horses—or nearly—the riders were overtaking them easily. The rearview mirror was gone, of course, but when Eric risked a glance over his shoulder he could see them clearly: black-armored riders, still nearly a dozen.
He was just glad there was no one else on the road now.
"'Fighting for Strangers,'" Ace said. "Quick!"
She took a deep breath and sang as the banjo sparkled into life. Not the usual sort of thing that Hosea played; this was a grim tune, full of hollow melancholy.
"'What makes you go abroad—fighting for strangers—when you could be safe at home—free from all dangers—'"
Hosea's strong baritone joined in on the counterpoint—if there was a folk song that Hosea didn't know, Eric had yet to discover it. Ace's pure soprano soared above his voice and the banjo both, carrying its message: give up, go home, you'll only get badly hurt if you fight. . . .
Eric felt the power of Ace's Gift wash over him, raising the hackles on the back of his neck. It took all his determination and will not to stop the car right there and get out. Ace reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, and the desperate desire to surrender eased slightly.
Magnus began to drum on the back of the seat with his hands in time to the song.
"'You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg—The enemy nearly slew you—You'll have to go out on the streets to beg—Oh poor Johnny what have they done to you?'"
There was a wildness and a sorrow in Ace's singing that made Eric want to lay his head down and cry, right there. It was not about this fight, right here: it was about every fight, every battle, since the beginning of Time—every time someone had left their home, for good cause or bad, and come back maimed, changed . . . or dead.
No reason for it. No good reason. Ever.
Fewer riders now.
"'What makes you go abroad—fighting for strangers—when you could be safe at home—free from all dangers—'"
No wonder Billy had wanted to keep her—no wonder Gabrevys had wanted to take her. No wonder Ace feared her own Talent so much. It was the ultimate seduction, the ultimate compulsion . . .
Much more of this and he was going to drive off the road. He had to stop. But not on the Parkway, and not at a rest stop. Now that he'd seen what Ace could do, Eric thought they had a chance against the rest of them, but he didn't want to involve any innocent bystanders.
There was an exit coming up. He took it at speed.
The other three never faltered until the jouncing became too great to ignore. Eric didn't think they'd noticed until then, lost in that place where good musicians go. He pumped the brakes, disastrously reminded when it was far too late to change his mind just how much heavier a good old fashioned piece of Detroit iron was than a modern piece of road-plastic.
Go-fast doesn't help much if you don't have slow-fast too.
Maybe their pursuers would overshoot. But it wouldn't matter. The nightmares they were riding were a lot more nimble than Big Pink. And if he put her in a ditch, it would take serious magick to get her out again. And they didn't have time for that.
But he reached the bottom of the ramp without incident. The exit put them on a two-lane country road with nothing on either side but fields and trees, and here, as opposed to the Parkway, the road was foggy. He'd stop right here, except for the fact that in his experience, there was always a lone traveler coming down these back roads doing eighty at just the wrong moment. He glanced back over his shoulder.
Through the spell-shield, he could see that the remaining riders—only four now—were gathered at the top of the ramp. Their eyes, and their mounts', glowed red.
Eric gunned the engine.
Two miles down the road he found what he was looking for. In season, it was probably a roadside cider stand. Right now it was nothing more than a wide spot in the road. He yanked Big Pink off the road so violently that the car spun completely around and ended up pointing back the way it had come.
But it was off the road.
He got out of the car, drawing his sword. On the other side, Hosea got out too, his hand pressed against the banjo's strings.
"Five-fifteen," Hosea said, glancing down. "Sunrise is 5:51. Don't know what dawn would be."
It was already a little less dark, but not dawn by any stretch of the imagination, and cold as only a March morning in New Jersey could be.
And Eric could hear hoofbeats in the distance. Coming slowly—why should they hurry? They knew precisely where Eric and the others were.
Eric looked around. They couldn't run. And fighting was starting to seem more and more like a losing proposition.
"Come on—quickly!" he said. "I have an idea."
Judah, Abidan, Coz, and Jakan—who in another time and another place answered to four quite different names—rode slowly down the road. They were the strongest of Gabrevys's Court—strong enough to resist the siren enchantment of the girl's Gift, when the others had turned and fled, sobbing like children.
Of course, having the chunk of Deathmetal dropped in their midst had hardly improved things. It had killed two of the mounts outright, and taken some of the fun out of the chase. If the four of them had not taken care to ride well back, they might have met the same inglorious fate—only think of the ignominy of being taken from a Hunt in full career by fleeing prey!—but Jormin had been more wary than that. He had met Bard Eric before. The mortal boy was clever, and the Deathmetal chariot was a weapon to be reckoned with.
And now at last the mortal Bard had chosen to fight, not flee. That might be entertaining in its own way. It was true that now he knew that he could not be harmed in body, nor could his brother, but the two hostages to fortune he rode with possessed no such sureties. What price would Bard Eric place on their safety?
The four reached the place where the Deathmetal vehicle was, and stopped.
It was empty.
Jormin rode forward, suspicious of a trap. His mount shied in the presence of so much iron, and he rowelled its sides ruthlessly.
He rode all the way around the vehicle. Nothing. No tracks leading away from it, no scent of them in the trees beyond. Only the reek of iron befouling his magick.
He swung down from his saddle and stepped forward, glancing up at the sky. Far less than an hour till the peu de porte opened, and the Soul-eaters came from their feeding pens in Bete Noir to feast. If Bard Eric and his brother were not there then to receive their attentions, Jormin was not certain they would still be lawful prey. What he did know was that the Soul-eaters could not be summoned again until another feeding pen was constructed, for this one would be gone in the spectacular display that Prince Gabrevys had promised them all.
He heard breathing.
It was coming from the back of the Deathmetal machine.
They were hiding within!
He clawed at it until the leather of his gauntlets smoked, and the pain of his burns made him hiss with rage, but he could not pry the closed compartment open. With a scream of fury, he brought both fists down on the metal, leaving a deep dent in it, then sprang back in dismay. If he crushed the compartment in which they had secreted themselves, he might kill the mortal Bard and his brother—and the punishment that would come to him for that made him shudder.
He backed away from the chariot, growling in anger. No spells he could summon would transport the entire object back to his master, and he could not open it. He could destroy it here, but to kill Sieur Eric and the boy Magnus outright would be a far more terrible failure than to simply fail to bring them back. Escaped prey could be captured later—but not all of Jormin's arts could re-animate the dead.
But if this vehicle would not yield to him, at least it would not serve its cowardly masters any longer. He lashed out at it with a levin-bolt. The iron made the magick ricochet spectacularly about the clearing—causing the other three to swear and dodge, and all four mounts to buck and shy—but the levin-bolt had its desired effect. For a moment the entire iron car was outlined in an eerie violet halation as the paint boiled up on the vehicle's surface, and all four tires melted.
There! The iron dragon would carry them no further at least.
Jormin did not like to confess failure. But at least he could wrap the tale in some success. He had marooned the worldlings here in the middle of nowhere. It would take them hours to reach civilization, and longer still to convince anyone that their tale held truth. And before they could manage that, the Prince could send mortals to retrieve them.
"Come, friends, let us away," he told the others. "The hour grows late—and we have sweet music to make!"
Okay, so maybe hiding in the trunk hadn't been such a good idea, Eric thought to himself. But it was still better than a full-on magickal brawl with four of the Unseleighe Court, especially when Hosea and Ace could be killed at will and Magnus—as far as Eric knew—didn't have any way of fighting back.
Of course, one good titanium crow-bar and their goose would have been cooked, but when he'd seen that Gabrevys hadn't been with their nightmare-riding pursuers—and remembered how feudal Elfhame Bete Noir had seemed—he'd played a hunch that these weren't exactly cutting-edge forward-thinking Unseleighe. That, powerful as they were, they were old—which meant just a bit set in their ways. Elves weren't big on creativity in the first place. Gabrevys might be able to come up with the idea of a Sidhe rock band of evil—he'd probably gotten the idea from a book—but unless he was on Fairgrove's restricted e-mail list, he wouldn't be current with the latest in nonferrous technology adaptations.
Still. Four people crammed into a car trunk. . . .
Of course, once they'd locked themselves into the trunk, the problem remained of getting out. . . .
"I can't breathe," Magnus complained in an undertone.
"If you can talk, you can breathe," Ace whispered back. But she sounded a little breathless herself.
It was stuffy in here—stuffy, hot, and very, very cramped, even though the Coupe de Ville had a trunk about the size of some of the smaller New York City apartments that Eric had seen. The dent in the trunk hadn't helped matters any; it was pressing hard against Eric's left shoulder, and he was pretty sure it was going to leave a bruise.
"Are they gone, do you think?" Hosea asked—with remarkable calm given the circumstances. Eric didn't know what all Jormin had done besides bang on the trunk: he did know that the car had rocked violently a couple of times and then settled sharply lower in a way that didn't bode well for the tires. "Ah cain see light around the edges of the trunk," Hosea added.
"I think so," Eric said. "I'm pretty sure I heard them ride off. We can't stay in here forever, anyway."
"You might be able to," Hosea said ruefully. "It's a bit of a tight fit for me."
"You had to bring the damned banjo," Magnus groaned.
"Hey—watch it!" Ace said. She sounded indignant rather than scared. Which was an improvement.
"Okay, everybody, hold still," Eric said. "I'm going to try to get the trunk open."
Eric was pretty sure he knew how sardines felt by the time he was done getting into position, and he didn't dare try a really high-powered spell, like the one he'd used to blow the roof off earlier. There was too much chance he'd just cook the lot of them.
He felt around for the lock mechanism, and piece by piece, humming "Step By Step" under his breath, he made it trickle away, until there was nothing there but a hole in the trunk. Now he could see out, and—fortunately—a lot more fresh air could get in.
Hosea was right. It was dawn.
And shouldn't the trunk have sprung open?
Eric pushed at it as best he could from his cramped position. It was almost impossible to get leverage, or, for that matter, move at all, with the four of them in here—it was just a good thing he'd changed back from armor to street clothes before they'd all piled in, or they'd never have managed it.
But the trunk lid wasn't moving. Jormin's blow must have jammed it shut.
"Stuck, is it?" Hosea said quietly.
"Yeah," Eric said with a sigh. There was no point in concealing the obvious.
"Anythin' you cain do?"
"One thing." One spell he knew—one of the handiest—was to make an inanimate object "remember" its original condition. Kory used it, back in their digs in San Francisco, to help restore the old townhouse to its former Victorian glory. It could be used to make old things new—for a time, anyway, at least when he did it, since it seemed to work better for elves than it ever did for him. And like most spells, it had its converse—though, oddly enough, the effects of this one didn't wear off. He could hurry an object's natural aging span, making it break down and decay—or rust—in a matter of minutes. If he did that here, the car should corrode to the point that they could get out of the trunk.
Of course, Margot would skin them all for destroying her ride. But that would be later.
He really hated to destroy such a beautiful machine. For a moment he hesitated, hoping there was another way. But there wasn't—nothing safe enough to use at such close quarters for all of them.
He'd better try it. Because just because Jormin and his pals had ridden off just now didn't mean they'd given up.
Eric placed a hand against the inside lid of the trunk, letting his mind fill with music.
Rust spread from his palm as if it were frost, and soon the air was filled with choking metallic dust—a side effect he hadn't anticipated. Eric closed his eyes tightly and held his breath, concentrating on the spell. His fingers sank into the suddenly rust-greasy metal, and he could feel Hosea adding his power and effort to the spell.
There was a shuddering groan as the Cadillac sank further to the ground with a squeal of protest as something within the frame gave way, and at last the trunk lid flew up in a cloud of rust and decaying carpet. Coughing and choking, the four refugees clambered out.
"Jesus," Magnus said comprehensively, staring at the car.
The tires—which appeared to have previously melted to puddles—had decayed to dust, and the wheel-rims were bent and rusting. The car rested on what was left of its door-panels on the gravel, as the jolt that had freed them from the trunk had been the last of the suspension giving way.
Both side-mirrors had fallen off. Every exposed bit of chrome that remained was pitted with green and brown corrosion. The roof, of course, had been torn off earlier that morning, and the twisted shears of tortured metal stood up like the stubs of decayed teeth. The headlights and tail-lights were shattered, as was every piece of glass and Bakelite in the cockpit. The (formerly) white leather seats were split and tattered, and had turned an ugly greenish-grey with age and mold. The stuffing and the springs were foaming out through the split and flaking leather like strange growths.
But it was the car's metallic pink paint-job that had undergone the most bizarre transformation, and one that owed little to Eric's spell. Most of it was gone entirely, the bare metal beneath red with rust where it had not flaked away entirely. But where the paint still remained, it was a sort of soup-green, and had bubbled up as if it were diseased. It was almost as if someone had turned the idea of the other color inside-out.
"Margot's going to kill you, Hosea," Ace said when she finally stopped coughing.
"Ayah," Hosea agreed glumly.
"Can you, like, fix it?" Magnus asked doubtfully. "We can't exactly walk out of here."
Eric shook his head. "Not fast enough." Not at all. I don't think even Monster Garage could do anything with this car now. He concentrated for a moment. "But Lady Day's on her way. I think it's safe now. When she gets here, I can talk her into turning into something to get the four of us to a phone—or back to New York. And there's something else I need to do while we're waiting."
For the first time since they'd opened the door out of the Grey Room Eric wasn't either running or fighting for his life. He dropped into mage-sight and took a look—a really good look—at the other three.
Magnus looked perfectly normal—no sign of any lingering spells around him at all. Eric breathed a sigh of relief.
But Ace and Hosea . . .
Both of them shimmered, ever-so-faintly, with spellwork.
Compared to these, the ones cast on his parents had been coarse and clumsy things. No wonder even Hosea hadn't noticed them. Eric stared at them intently: he needed to know what they were before he destroyed them, lest he do more damage.
"What is it?" Hosea asked, seeing the intensity of his stare.
"You've been bespelled," Eric said absently, most of his attention still on the spell. "You and Ace both. It looks like Jormin's work—" There! He had it now—a compulsion, very subtle, to keep them both in the immediate area where it had been set. They'd do anything they thought they had to in order to fulfill it; in fact, if Eric weren't here to stop them, they'd probably start heading back to Atlantic City soon—coming up with some reason why that was a good idea and managing to forget all the reasons it wasn't. No wonder Ria wasn't already down here, guns blazing. They'd probably kept everything they'd known or suspected about Gabriel Horn to themselves, without knowing why they'd done it.
Ace stared at him for a moment, then suddenly burst into tears. Hosea put a comforting arm around her.
"You could of been a mite more tactful about that, Eric," the Ozark Bard said mildly.
"I can fix it," Eric said quickly. "Not fix it, but . . . Don't worry. I can make it unravel."
He filled his hands with the Flute of Air, and suddenly the misty clearing was filled with the pure spiraling mathematics of a Bach prelude. The notes seemed to coil round and round, describing golden spirals in the air, each one alone and only, making shining helixes in the air. They rose up like motes of light to his inner sight, and then began to settle slowly over Ace and Hosea.
And everywhere they touched, a strand of the Unseleighe magick melted away.
At last it was gone. Whatever spells had bound them against their will and knowledge bound them no longer.
"What did it do?" Hosea asked, when Eric had stopped playing.
"I think—I'm pretty sure—Jormin placed a geas on both of you to keep you from leaving the immediate area." Eric sent the Flute of Air back to where it came from. "It was good. Really good. You'd have to have a lot more experience in magick than you do to have known it was there, or that he was putting it on you. You didn't know about it, but unconsciously you'd do whatever you had to in order to stay there."
"Includin' not callin' for help—when that would o' been the smartest thing to do," Hosea said in disgust.
"Hey, if you'd been smart, bro and I would be zombies by now," Magnus said. "So it ended up being a good thing," He leaned back against the fender of the rusted Caddy. It promptly tore loose and dumped him onto the ground.
"Serves you right," Ace said promptly. But she reached down and gave him her hand.
"Hey," Kayla said from the side of the road. "Oh, shit—is that Margot's car?"
Get a dog and you'll never need an alarm clock again. Kayla reminded herself that it could have been worse.
Brenda could have asked her to baby-sit a real kid for a weekend.
Why couldn't Molly have been a cat? She'd had a vague idea that her Spring Break would be a time when she would actually get a chance to catch up on her sleep. What Brenda hadn't mentioned was that Molly would see no reason to change her morning schedule just because Kayla had the rare chance to sleep in. Molly was up bright and early—very early—to take care of a dog's morning needs (which meant that Kayla was up and dressed, since she couldn't very well hand Molly her leash and send her out by herself), after which Molly wanted breakfast, after which Molly wanted (you guessed it) another outing.
After that, of course, the pug was perfectly happy to curl up again and snuggle and even go back to sleep for several hours, but by that time, like it or not, Kayla was wide awake. She'd never had that ability to just doze off whenever she felt like it.
Still, it wasn't Molly's fault that Brenda was a (shudder) Morning Person. And Molly was so charming and full of fun that it was impossible to be mad at her, even when you were being awakened at oh-dark-thirty by a sloppy face full of wet pug kisses. How could you be angry with anything that could maintain that level of enthusiasm from the time she woke up to the time she went to sleep?
But if she ever got a dog of her own, Kayla was going to make sure that the mutt understood that morning started at a reasonable hour—eight-thirty, say. Or maybe noon.
On this particular morning, though, Molly hadn't had to wake her up. Kayla hadn't gotten much sleep, and she was pretty certain she wasn't the only one in the building suffering from the insomnia.
Eric was still missing, and so was Magnus. And Lady Day was here, fretting, but unable to tell them why, and it was too much like the last time that had happened for Kayla's peace of mind. Ria had already checked all the hospitals, and Toni and Paul had checked out the "giant wolf" sightings near Gussie's school, but—frustratingly!—Toni had said the Guardians couldn't do anything more. Or at least, not as Guardians, and what they could do as Eric's friends was minimal.
"It doesn't seem to be Guardian business, Kayla. I'm sorry," was all Toni could say, shrugging helplessly.
At least the last phone call Ria'd had from Hosea, last night around seven, sounded as if there wasn't too much in the way of trouble going on down there—if Kayla knew Too Tall at all, he'd be back today to help look for Eric. Maybe he was already on the way back.
Maybe he was already here, and looking.
Not that there was any place to look for Eric.
Which left Kayla to pace, and worry, spend a mostly sleepless night worrying about things she couldn't do anything about, and take Molly for an extra-long post-breakfast walk to relieve her nerves. Not for the first time, she wished her particular Talent was for something besides Healing. Finding, for instance. That would be pretty useful right now.
She was just heading back toward the apartment along the street that bordered the small parking area behind Guardian House when she saw a sudden flare of headlights in the lot.
That caught her attention; she made it her business to notice anything out of the ordinary in and around Guardian House. It was a little early for anyone to be leaving for work, and almost everyone took the bus or the subway anyway, since parking in New York was a nightmare. Maybe someone was taking an early weekend?
No.
There was only one bright-red motorcycle in the lot, and it was the one doing the moving. And there wasn't anyone on it.
It was Lady Day. The elvensteed was going somewhere. Alone.
Not a bloody chance.
Without thinking twice, Kayla scooped Molly up under one arm and ran toward the bike. Lady Day was just starting to back out of her parking slot as Kayla vaulted into the saddle, holding the enthusiastically wriggling pug tightly against her chest. She didn't really want to bring Molly along on this adventure—excellent or otherwise—but she had no choice: she knew Lady Day wouldn't wait for her to put Molly back in the apartment. Lady Day might not want to let her come along—but Kayla wasn't going to take no for an answer.
"Wherever you're going, girl, I'm going with you," Kayla said firmly. "If Eric needs you, he probably needs some reinforcements."
Like she'd be much in the way of reinforcements. . . .
At least Lady Day didn't try to buck her off. Well, the elvensteed had let Kayla ride her before. And if she was going where Eric was, odds were he'd need a Healer, like the last time he'd gone missing. She'd be of that much use, anyway.
The bike turned onto the street and sped up, heading in the direction of the George Washington Bridge. Okay, I don't need to steer, so—Holding on to to Molly in case the idiot dog got the idea to try to jump off, and wishing she had a third hand, Kayla unstrapped Eric's spare helmet from the back of the bike and shoved it onto her head. Good thing the chin-strap had a Velcro fastener in addition to the buckle, because you couldn't buckle anything with just one hand. Fortunately she was already dressed for the weather—which meant gloves and boots and her leather jacket. She held on tightly to the handlebars with one hand and Molly with the other; the pug barked enthusiastically, obviously enjoying the ride.
"I just hope we get there fast—and there's no tolls," Kayla said. She had her purse with her, slung crosswise over her shoulder, SOP in New York to deter purse-snatchers, but she wasn't sure how the toll-booth attendants would react to her furry passenger.
She needn't have worried. There were toll-booths, but Lady Day didn't stop for them. Lady Day didn't stop for anything: traffic lights, yield signs, oncoming traffic. Kayla had no idea how fast they were going, but none of the other drivers seemed to notice them—a good thing, too, as she didn't think even all of Eric's elf-kenned gold could pay for the speeding tickets they should have gotten . . . not to mention driving through the toll-booths. But the alarms on the booths didn't even go off. It was as if they were ghosts.
They crossed the bridge and headed into New Jersey. Kayla muttered a despairing curse when she realized that wherever Eric was, it was probably a lot farther away than Hoboken. Lady Day went faster.
Then something really, really odd happened. The world itself stopped obeying the laws of physics as Kayla understood them. By the time they reached the Garden State Parkway, the outside world had become nothing more than a bright blur, whipping by literally too fast to be seen, like something out of an old science-fiction movie. There was a faint high humming in the air that seemed to waver up and down a note or two, monotonously, but other than that, an eerie silence.
And instead of the blast of wind that she expected—that ought to be there, if she was riding on a motorcycle traveling as fast as this one had to be traveling—there was nothing more than a faint breeze.
Magick. Eric had told her that the elvensteeds had some way of traveling fast and invisibly in the World Above. She'd believed him, but hadn't really thought about the mechanics of such a thing. It wasn't lightspeed, of course, but it sure seemed as if Einstein would have taken one look at what was happening and gone off to shoot himself.
She didn't want to try stepping off to test how far the magick ran, though.
And even Molly was quiet. Finally.
After a few minutes of that—just as Kayla was starting to get used to traveling on Twilight Zone Motorways—the elvensteed began to slow. The world outside took on form. Nothing but trees—for an instant Kayla wondered if they'd gone Underhill, but the road was still here, so she guessed they hadn't. Lower New Jersey, then; outside of the industrial wasteland where the state was still rural and (so she'd heard) really pretty.
Slower still, maybe in the lower three digits now. Green road signs flashed by, much too fast to make out. The center line was still one continuous blur. Instinctively she gripped the handlebar and tucked her head down behind the windscreen.
The high humming began to be replaced with the roar of the wind, and the faint breeze became stronger by the moment.
Slower still—ninety? a hundred? A sign for someplace called "Cape May" flashed by. Now the wind was a real wind, pulling at her jacket and whistling over the helmet. She tucked Molly's head tightly against her chest, wishing that somebody made pug-sized biker-goggles. Or at least, that she'd thought to stick Molly inside her jacket while they were still traveling their own private wormhole.
There was a flash of pink at the side of the road. It whipped past almost before she'd registered it.
Oh, god. Is that—?
It had looked like part of Big Pink, Margot's car.
Had there been an accident?
Oh, no, please.
Kayla flinched inwardly, bracing herself for what she might encounter with a sense of pure nausea. Sure, she could heal damage, but what people tended to forget was that before she could fix injuries, she had to feel them, most of the time. There was no way you could call that fun by any stretch of the imagination. And there was always the problem that if someone was hurt bad enough, she could get sucked into their pain and need and they'd both die. . . .
Lady Day slowed still further, and Kayla saw a sign: Myers Corners Exit: 1 Mi.
They took the ramp. Someone had laid serious rubber all the way down recently, she noted. Her tension eased a little. Maybe not an accident.
Lady Day coasted down the side road in an eerie silence, and it took Kayla a moment to realize that she wasn't hearing engine noises from the elvenbike. Well, they were pretty much optional.
And up ahead . . .
There were four people standing in a little knot at the side of the road. From their body language, things were uncomfortable, but not critical. And nobody was hurt.
Eric. Magnus. Ace. Hosea. Alive and well.
And . . . Margot's car?
No. . . .
"What are you doing here?" Eric demanded, as Kayla swung off the elvenbike and walked toward them. For some reason, she had Molly-the-Pug with her, and the little dog danced around in circles at the end of her leash, barking joyfully.
Well, at least someone was happy. Poor little flea-bait probably hadn't seen real countryside in her entire life.
"I was out walking the furkid when your ride lit up," Kayla said, shrugging. "I figured she was going wherever you were, and I didn't want to miss the fun. An' it wasn't like your bike was going to wait for me to park the dog with Toni or anything. So what the hell's going on? The Unseleighe Court set up shop in Jersey?"
She'd meant that as a joke. Unfortunately, of course, she could probably tell by his face that it wasn't. And he had decided it was time to break chapter one of the Book of Bad News to her.
"Actually . . . yeah," Eric said. "And we need to get to a phone pronto."
"Well," Kayla said, dropping the leash—Molly immediately ran to Ace and began making shameless overtures—and digging in her backpack, "how about if a phone comes to you?"
She retrieved the phone and held it out, still not quite able to take her eyes off the wreck of the car behind the four of them. "Fully charged. I checked this morning before I went out."
It was six-twenty in the morning, but Ria Llewellyn had already been at her desk for over an hour. A multinational holding company didn't sleep, and if there was one thing the Threshold disaster had taught her, it was that the price of "clean hands" at the corporate level was eternal vigilance over the doings of one's underlings.
Fortunately, eternal vigilance was a little easier on someone who was half elven. Elves didn't sleep as such, and half elves, while they did need to recharge, didn't need a lot of sleep; two hours, maybe three. Which was proving to be a good thing.
Especially these days, when the world seemed to be taking the fight against terrorism as a blank check to impose measures large and small that had nothing to do with anti-terrorism, and everything to do with the convenience of government and big business. What was it Jefferson had said about a government big enough to supply everything you needed was big enough to take away everything as well? Ria had no objection to making money herself—money could buy so many pleasant things—but there were sane and reasonable limits, which one had to fight tooth and nail to maintain, it seemed. . . .
The Arabs had a saying too; if you let the camel's nose into the tent, pretty soon you had the whole camel in there.
But LlewellCo wasn't the only thing occupying her at the moment. Would that it were. The charter for the Ria Llewellyn Foundation was an ongoing series of minor annoyances, as was the purchase of a suitable large and isolated parcel of land on the East Coast to build what Eric insisted on calling "Hogwarts West" upon. There was deciding how best to settle the matter of Michael and Fiona Banyon once and for all. Reviewing Derek's latest memorandum to Judge Springsteen on Billy Fairchild's unsuitability to retain custody of his daughter.
But positively the most urgent and desperately annoying problem was that of Eric and Magnus's kidnapping.
The list of Unseleighe with the power to operate effectively in Manhattan was short—if you defined "effective" not just as the ability to walk around and sight-see—Kory could do that, and he was only a Magus Minor—but to shape-shift, spell-cast, and muster up enough power to take out a fully trained Bard. A few days ago she would have said such a list was nonexistent. Obviously it was not.
There was the possibility that whoever this was had found allies that had no trouble with Cold Iron. It wasn't unheard of, but the Unseleighe were not noted for their cooperative spirits.
And why would the Seleighe take him without telling her? Especially after that last time—she'd made her feelings perfectly clear. The chill in her message to Prince Arvin probably kept his drinks cold for a month.
The first thing she'd done after they'd learned that Eric and Magnus had been taken was to write down as much as she knew and courier it up to Inigo Moonlight in Carbonek. The elven "Confidential Inquiry Agent and Researcher of the Arcane" had far more Underhill contacts than Ria did: if Eric were Underhill—in either Court—Mr. Moonlight would be able to locate him, and, just as important, tell Ria why he and Magnus had been taken.
Doing that bought her time to think sensibly and carefully. If the kidnapping was a side effect of some annoying Sidhe vendetta, and had nothing to do with Eric personally, the very last thing she wanted to do was tell Elfhame Misthold about it. She'd spent the first few decades of her life listening to her Unseleighe father plot long elaborate schemes and vengeances against a constantly expanding enemies list, and knew exactly how long Sidhe memories could be—and how their quarrels could escalate. Eric had been caught up in one once. Never again. Telling Arvin would only bring Misthold in on the quarrel and make things worse for decades to come.
She'd also used her own spellcraft to try to locate Eric. Ria was a sorceress: neither an Elven Magus nor a mortal magician, her unique abilities were a peculiar blend of both sides of her mixed-blood heritage. And she'd come up with precisely nothing. Not scrying, not psychometry, not pyromancy—no form of divination or clairvoyance that she tried had revealed either Eric or Magnus's location. True, she wasn't primarily a scryer nor a far-seer; she hadn't the practice in it that specialists did. Nevertheless, the fact that she was drawing a blank bothered her profoundly.
All that left was a waiting game, and she didn't like it. Maybe Hosea would have better luck than she'd had—he was Eric's apprentice, after all. Maybe there was a link there that he could follow. She'd wait till a slightly more civilized hour and call him. Whether he'd found any traces of the Dark Court beyond the spell he'd detected at Ace's hearing or not, she still wanted the two of them back here where she could keep a closer eye on them. And come to that, something about everything going on down in Atlantic City just didn't add up. . . .
The phone rang. She glanced down. Her private line, and Kayla's number. She grabbed for it.
"Ria."
"Hi, Ria. Don't worry, we're all right."
She closed her eyes in relief. Dear gods, those were the words she wanted to hear more than any others right now. . . .
"Eric!"
"But that's just about all the good news," Eric went on. "First things first: there's a free concert today at the Heavenly Grace Cathedral and Casino of Prayer. Gabriel Horn has set a bomb to go off during the concert. I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in the casino—it's being closed down during the concert—but I'm not sure."
Trust Eric to show up out of nowhere and present her with a full-blown disaster as casually as other men would offer her a bouquet of flowers.
Yes, but that means he knows deep down where it counts that you can handle disasters, and you can probably do something about them. There had been men in her life who had taken one look at her and assumed she had gotten where she was by accident.
"What do you need me to do?" Ria asked simply.
She heard Eric laugh a little raggedly.
"None of us here would make the most credible witness—Ace overheard Horn telling Billy about it while she was burgling his office, but Horn told Billy the bomb would be a dud, to whip up support for Billy's White Power Crusade. Horn told us he intends it to be the real thing—but that was while he was holding Ace, Magnus, and me prisoner. That's because Gabriel Horn is Prince Gabrevys ap Ganeliel—Jachiel's father—and he blames me for the fact that his son is at Misthold. Among other things, he wants revenge. Lots of it, probably involving pain, dismemberment, and emotional suffering beforehand."
Elven vendetta, Ria thought aggrievedly. I knew it. I swear, you'd think that with their long lives they'd have figured out something better to do with their time.
"But he can't just take out a Bard," she said aloud. Not because she believed it, but because she wanted to figure out how the little bastard had created bonsai out of the treaties and laws that governed Underhill to allow him to take out a Bard.
By the sound of Eric's long-suffering sigh, she wasn't the first person to have said that to him lately.
"He can if the Bard's parents set the Bard up by accident," Eric said. "Long story. I'll tell you later. Anyway, nobody's going to believe any of us if we report the bomb, and if the authorities try to check out the warning with Horn or any of his people—and I think he's got a lot of his own people into the Ministry by now—he'll just englamour them and make them go away thinking everything's all right."
"So you thought of me," Ria said dryly, thinking hard. Surely, with all of this so-called "War on Terror" nonsense, she could find someone, somewhere whose paranoia she could use as a crowbar to lever this mess open, or a hammer to beat it into submission. "When is this bomb supposed to go off?"
"I think he'll want to go for the biggest mess he can make," Eric said. "The concert's supposed to start at noon, but there were people already there the middle of last night. Oh, and Kayla's here, if you're looking for her—I summoned Lady Day and she, uh, sort of hitched a ride. But that's a good thing, it turns out, because none of our cellphones are working for some reason, and hers is."
It lacked only that, it really did, Ria thought. She also thought about ordering him to send Kayla right back on Lady Day, reckoned the odds of that actually happening, took a deep breath, and banished the problem of Kayla from her thoughts before she spoke.
"I'll do everything I can," Ria said. "I wish I could promise, but the two of them—Horn and Fairchild—seem to have their hooks into things pretty deeply down there—and now we know why." Something else occurred to her, as she allowed her head to shift into the twisty paths that the Unseleighe—and, come to think of it, government officials—usually took. "And Eric . . . you do realize that Horn might have known that Ace was listening to the original conversation all along and just lied to Billy, knowing that Ace would overhear it?"
There was a stunned silence from the other end of the line. No, obviously Eric hadn't considered anything like that. But Eric hadn't grown up as a pawn of Perenor's plots and counterplots.
"But he told us the same thing when we were his prisoners," Eric said blankly. "It has to be true. And no matter what . . . we can't just ignore it."
No, we can't. No sane person could. But the Sidhe, especially the Unseleighe Court, aren't sane by any definition of the World Above. Certainly Gabrevys would lie to someone he was preparing to kill. Certainly he'd want to put Ace in the position of having to go to the police with the story that her father was involved in a plot to blow up his own casino. And certainly he'd like to take me out of the game now by making me cry "wolf" in this spectacularly public fashion about something that turns out not to be true. . . . And certainly he is capable of thinking of a hundred plots and counterplots on the spur of the moment. Nothing is too tangled a web for him to weave.
But we don't dare take the chance he's bluffing. . . .
"I'll do as much as I can do from here," Ria said. "But this time, Eric . . . I can't make any guarantees." She thought for a moment. "Where are you? Do you want me to send a car for you?"
She could almost feel him grin, ruefully.
"Actually, I'm not sure where we are—but I am sure it wouldn't be a good idea for us to stay here long enough for your car to get here. We managed to out-think the Unseleighe so far, but I'm sure Gabrevys has plenty of plain old mortals on his payroll, too. His guys went away when they couldn't get past the Cold Iron box we were hiding in, but they know where they left us. We need to haul ass away from here before they decide to wake up a mortal or three and send them with shotguns. Lady Day can get us back to the Garden State Parkway, and we'll do our best to get back to Atlantic City from there. Maybe there's some place around here we can rent a car."
"Or steal one." Ria laughed. "Good luck in convincing your elvensteed to become a charabanc. And . . . be careful."
"I'm always careful," Eric said virtuously.