Oberon’s actual castle was part granite stonework, part emerged crystal, and part living timber, and it served as one of the anchor points for the layers and layers of interconnected pockets of fae-made lands.
Besides a few stops along the public Heartway transit system, a handful of special locations allowed easy movement out of the fae realms. Most were gateways into the mundane world. Most were mapped. Some were secret and used by royalty. All were used by spies.
The location Robin dragged Wrenn toward sat inside the castle, on a midlevel tier built on top of the intertwined branches of three massive, mighty, east-facing oak trees.
“Why am I here, Robin?” she asked. They’d wound their way through the crystals and onto a boulevard-wide branch of one of the trees.
Robin smoothed his well-tailored uniform. “You are here—” Then he did the same with his luscious black curls, smoothing them away from his cute little horn nubs. “—because the dryads are back.”
The intelligence dryads and naiads sent out would trickle back in over the next few days. Two coming in early didn’t mean anything.
Robin tossed her one of his prissy looks. He leaned close to her ear. “I sent this pair into elf territory.”
“What?” Did the elves really have something to do with their vampire problem? He must have information about the North American enclave who were harboring vampires.
Robin’s demeanor subtly shifted from the more personable body language he used with her to his more standard backstabbing prissiness. Robin flicked his wrist and pranced around while wearing his cute glamour as a way to remind the less powerful who was in charge.
He sniffed, but said no more.
Wrenn understood the hint. By sending intelligence dryads into elf territory, Robin might have crossed lines he should not have crossed and any hint might prick problematic ears.
The elves might be fewer in number than the fae, but they were just as powerful. And elves did not freely show their business, nor their magicks.
There were agreements. Nothing particularly binding—the elves were not stupid enough to make deals with the fae—but they did offer each other respect. No nosing around. No spying. General good-neighbor stuff, which it seemed Robin had decided to ignore, and probably rightly so.
Those vampires harbored by the North American enclave might have bitten the elves on the butt. “Did that video of the little elf girl get Oberon to authorize sending in investigators?” Because one part of this puzzle was understanding why elves harbored vampires. Even minor ones.
The elves had wiped the video off the mundane internet almost immediately, but Robin had still managed to get her a copy, mostly because he knew she’d been trying to get any info she could about the enclave.
Robin screwed up his face in an expression that said maybe, maybe not.
“What does that mean?” she asked. A video like that, one that sort of revealed the little girl’s tall elven ears, could have been a danger to all magicals, not just the elves.
“It means,” Robin ushered her into the antechamber of the large, leaf-lined sanctum where the dryads reported, “that the why in all this is above both our pay grades.”
Very little was above the access that came with the Goodfellow name. “Above our pay grade” did not often apply. She nodded and followed Robin across the shimmering red and green magic gate into the dryads’ sanctum.
Robin held his finger to his lips. One did not speak inside the sanctum. One only listened.
Two quick steps and they stood under the massive stones that made up the henge in which the dryads reported. Each stone had been set into the branch’s wood, and bark had grown up around their bases, holding them in place.
Two intelligence agents in their antlered armor stood in the center. They mirrored each other’s movements, as was their way, and sent their report into the curls of magic flowing through the sanctum like ghosts of an aurora.
The agents told of the elves’ land, and a blizzard. Of how, with elves, the forest and its animals lived protected from the pollution and murder of the mundanes, and how the land understood that soon not even its magicals could stop the coming death and damage.
Wrenn shook her head. Mundanes were destructive to the natural world.
The dryads continued: The land spoke of werewolves and elves and witches gone mad. Of concealments they could not read and of wolves masquerading as genies.
Then they spoke of a vampire.
Wrenn shuddered as if she’d fallen under a frozen lake’s ice.
It’s him, she mouthed to Robin.
Two hundred years out there, probably hiding in caves and feeding on rats, but he’d survived that night in Edinburgh. She now had proof—and evidence that he might still be out there terrorizing the world.
Robin touched his lips again, and leaned his head toward the dryads.
There was another, the dryads reported. A big man who was mundane, yet not. A man who heard the dryads, and saw their magic.
Robin squeezed her hand.
She saw magic. She heard the dryads. And she was mundane, yet not.
This man might have been touched by the same forces Victor had used to make her “viable,” as he’d said, and to bring her witch abilities to the surface. He could, like her, be a victim of Victor’s experiments.
Or he could be something entirely worse. Something that had survived a supposed death on an Arctic ice floe.
The vampire her captor had created was bad enough, but this man—this monster—was why Victor had kidnapped her in the first place. Because he’d wanted a mate.
Wrenn Goodfellow was no monster’s bride.
Robin pulled his phone out of his pocket and tapped on the app he used to call up the non-Heartway gateways, the spots only royalty used, then turned it so she could see.
The closest gate to the elves’ home was some distance north, situated on a trail inside protected land labeled Paul Bunyan State Forest.
Then he quickly closed the app and stuck the phone back into his pocket.
Thank you, she mouthed. Send me now. Please.
Robin frowned.
Residents of Oberon’s Castle were supposed to use the Heartway when traveling into the mundane world. Only so many fae could walk the world at the same time, and Oberon was a stickler for this particular rule.
Even his Second had to follow procedure.
Victor Frankenstein had held her captive. He’d unleashed a demigod of a vampire. And he’d lied about the death of his first mistake—a mistake that might have information about his vampiric brother.
Wrenn Goodfellow turned on her heels. She’d never, not once, made others pay for her pain and existence. The men of Frankenstein did.
“Robin…” she whispered.
One of the dryads shrieked.