Pebbles bounced along the dry ground away from Ed and Wrenn’s shuffling feet.
She gasped and rolled away from him, her hand over the left side of her face as if he’d just slashed her cheek.
He hadn’t. Someone—something—had, right where Victor had licked the aspect of Wrenn in the white dress. Blood seeped through her fingers.
“You okay?” The elves never did anything like that. Not that kind of blood magic.
Wrenn gasped again and… flickered.
Ed blinked. Was it the shadows? His eyes hadn’t adjusted to the gloom. Except he’d seen flickers like that before, when a glamour broke.
“I didn’t have a token.” She looked at the blood on her hand. “The Heartway took… other things.”
Something in his mind flickered as if an internal glamour wavered. Not now, he thought. He hadn’t had a flashback to his boot coming down on that vamp’s jaw in years. To how much different vampire blood smelled from mundane blood. To…
He rubbed his face. Damned fae magic took a slice out of his brain.
“Did you…” He shook and tapped his own temple.
Her eyes narrowed. “It can’t take from you. You’re a mundane.”
So are you, he thought.
She patted at the cut on her cheek. It, at least, had already stopped bleeding.
The Heartway had showed Ed something he shouldn’t have seen. Not only his own flashback, but hers, too. He nodded once and let it be. It wasn’t his place to add to the invasion.
Wrenn staggered to her feet and moved into the shadows. She obviously needed a moment.
He looked around. Crumbling adobe walls surrounded where they landed. To their west, a gap in the wall showed the final salmons and pinks of evening as they spread over the horizon. To their east, another gap in the walls—pretty much only the corners of the building still stood—revealed thick brush. Something skittered away, probably a horned lizard, and vanished under a jumble of branches. Birds chirped. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote yipped.
Ed inhaled. A heavy Gulf of Mexico breeze slapped humidity against his nose and sinuses.
They’d landed inside the remains of an old mission somewhere on the Gulf Coast, not far from the ocean.
Wrenn wiped the blood onto her black pants. “This building used to be the local equivalent to Manny’s Backwoods Lodge in the Paul Bunyan Forest. Such places tend to harbor unused Heartway stops.”
She waved as if she refused to say any more.
So no more talk of the Heartway and its heart-ripping ways, which was fine with him.
She extended her hand to help him up. “We should be in a place called Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.”
Overhead, stars shimmered in the evening sky—and a dull glow danced along the horizon to the south.
They were near a town. A big one, too, from the light pollution.
The town was likely Brownsville, which meant they weren’t anywhere near Santo Guijarro County. But it also meant they were considerably closer to South Padre Island—and one of the most powerful Gulf Coast vampire clans.
American vampires were not Old World vampires. American vampires were new money, relatively speaking. American vampires were corporate.
Lots of shipping money, in New Orleans. Lots of oil money, in Texas. And all along the coast from the Everglades to South Padre, lots of tourist destinations, especially destinations where transient young people liked to get drunk and act stupid.
American vampires were as American as baseball, apple pie, and tax evasion.
Ed dusted off his knees and tied his jacket around his waist. Winter temperatures in South Texas were normal summer temperatures in Minnesota, and he’d overheat damned fast if he didn’t drop the coat. “Is he taking them to the Claytons?” he asked as he stripped off his hat and stuck it into his back pocket.
Wrenn frowned. She didn’t seem fazed by the change in temperature, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. He’d seen her brother—not her vampire brother, but Frank Victorsson—walk around totally unfazed by temperature changes, too.
And after the little bit of privacy invasion he’d just witnessed in the Heartway, he was one hundred percent certain that Alfheim’s elf-raised son of Victor had a fae-raised sister.
All of which he stuffed into his Wrenn Goodfellow file in the back of his mind.
“Warren Clayton Jr., patriarch of Clayton Gas and Oil, master of his domain, and owner of half of South Padre Island via an intricate web of shell corporations.” Wrenn pulled out her phone again. “Warren Clayton, Jr. also happens to be the one and only Warren Clayton of Belfast, a grifter of a man born right around the same time as I was.” She held the device again as if looking for service. “And one of the first Anglos in this area.” She tapped at the screen. “His son disappeared about ten years ago.”
She knew more about the clans than he did. “You and I are going to share notes when this is done,” he said.
Wrenn looked him up and down. “No deals, remember, Sheriff? Not even with fae-adjacent witches.”
There was that witch thing again. He filed that, too. “Where are my kids?”
Unlike Paul Bunyan, reserves in this part of Texas were full of roads and trails. If Ranger got the van onto a flatter surface, he’d have them out and to the vamps in no time.
He pulled out his phone and called up the GPS tracker.
According to the app, the van was literally on top of them.
He cocked his head, listening for little clicks, or small noises, or dust settling. And there, just on the other side of the south wall, a small tick of a cooling engine.
“Gabe!” he shouted. “Sophia!” He bolted around the adobe.
The van teetered on a pile of what was left of his garage. The door into the house stuck out from under the back tires, and the garage door under the front. The concrete of the floor lay strewn about like beach sand. His snowblower sat on its side against the adobe of the old mission.
No way the van, even if it had been capable of moving, would have gotten off that rubble in one piece.
“Where are my kids?” He peered into the bush. “Gabe! Sophia!” he called again as he scrambled up the rubble pile.
The van was empty. He peered in through the back windows looking for any clue. “The kids’ phones.”
“Careful!” Wrenn called from down below.
Ed crawled in through the open back passenger door. No blood. No burn marks, either, which was good. He fished the phones out of the back and tucked them into his pockets with his own. “I don’t think they’re wounded.”
Wrenn closed her eyes as if listening. “He can move fast in stallion form,” she said.
Ed clambered down the rubble pile. “How fast? Which direction? Are they riding him? Riding a kelpie is seriously bad juju, isn’t it?”
Was one of his kids carrying that damned sword like it was Excalibur or something? He had a flash of Gabe dealing with all the crap that came with being the Once and Future King.
Because they needed that, too.
“Ranger won’t hurt them,” said Wrenn. Her expression said the rest of what she was thinking: He’ll leave that for the vampires.
That kelpie wasn’t going to survive this. He’d be dead before the sun came up. Either the vamps would kill him, or the elves would.
Or Ed would do it himself.
Ranger had crossed the line from capture-and-detain to clear-and-present-danger the moment he’d stepped out of the fae realms. He, like the vamps, was the magical equivalent of a rabid animal.
Ed pulled out his own phone and dialed. “Bjorn,” he said. “We’re in Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge near South Padre Island.” He hung up. The elves might be able to dial themselves in with their magic in some sort of Heartway way… but he’d never seen them do so. Ever. They flew in airplanes like everyone else.
Which meant they’d be here in the morning, at the earliest.
Wrenn peered through the trees. “The clans want you, not your kids, Ed.”
Ed wasn’t so sure about that. Not after Sophia’s bout with… something… on Samhain evening. He couldn’t remember. “They’re bait. I know. Answer my questions. Which way? How far ahead are they?”
She held up her hand as if she were listening for something.
Back in Alfheim, Bjorn had zapped him with a spell to clear away his fatigue. Which it had. But he was pretty sure the shortness of temper that always happened when he needed sleep was still there. Still festering. Still making him hotheaded.
That hotheadedness was what had gotten him into his original vampire problem.
She looked around. “We need a plan,” she said.
Ah, yes, he thought. Our best-laid plans.
Wrenn shook her head, then peered into the trees again. “I don’t see where they are,” she said. “Ranger’s not actively spiking his magic. I think I hear Red.”
The sword was still talking to her. “What’s it saying? Is it aware that it’s with my kids?” Because the other magical artifact seemed well aware when it was around children.
“She keeps repeating ‘We bind thee, Fenrir.’ I can track her, but she’s not stable enough to help.” Wrenn snatched a good-sized branch off the ground. “So we need a plan, especially if we run into vampires.” She twirled it around her hand. “Will one of these work on the local vamps if I use it as a stake?”
Fenrir, he thought. “Fenrir?” he asked.
Fenrir meant Ragnarok.
And Ragnarok meant an end to the elves.
He didn’t know that for sure. But then again, most people who got a cancer diagnosis didn't know for sure that it was going to kill them. Who knew? You might get hit by a bus instead.
“Fenrir,” he sighed. Ragnarok was going to kill him. He was pretty sure of it. “I need to get my kids.” Get them home and make plans to keep his family as safe as possible during the end of the world.
The expression on Wrenn’s face suggested that she was a lot better at reading people than her brother. It also suggested that she was a lot better at making sure other people didn’t read her. “You do understand that if this leads to one of us—or Ranger, for that matter—killing Warren Clayton, there’s going to be a war.”
Ed sighed again. “From my understanding, the kelpies thought they could profit off the vamp-on-vamp violence that’s already going on.” He pushed his way into the brush again. “As a great man once said, ‘Let them fight.’”
The faster the dark magicals killed each other off, the fewer of them they’d have to deal with post-Ragnarok. If there was going to be a post-Ragnarok.
“They’re kidnapping regular fae and feeding them to the vampires,” Wrenn said.
“That damned kelpie kidnapped my regular kids and he’s about to feed them to the vampires!” Ed shouted.
Whatever Bjorn had done to counter his fatigue hadn’t propped up the mechanisms he used to keep his hotheadedness under control. Probably because that control came from a lot of what his wife called metacognition.
Wrenn peered at Ed’s eyes. “Bjorn Thorsson’s anti-fatigue spell is wearing off.” She didn’t ask. She stated.
“You think, Victorsdottir?”
Her jaw clenched. “I was on the brink of drowning. Victor found me. He made sure I didn’t die.” She blinked three, four times in rapid succession. “He told me I couldn’t leave because he’d built a monster and that monster wanted me as his mate.”
“And?” Ed asked. She was big and strong and could have smacked the living shit out of that fop he’d seen in the Heartway so she was running on excuses.
Her lip twitched. “You’re his friend, aren’t you?”
“Who?” he responded, though he knew damned well who she meant.
“The monster.”
Ed laughed. “You believed what Victor Frankenstein told you?”
“He tried to drown me.” Her voice had turned ice cold.
Ed blinked. “Victor tried to drown you? I thought you said he’d saved you.”
She looked as if she was about to throw a punch. “Your friend tried to drown me,” she spat through clenched teeth.
And there it was. The railroad connecting two hundred years of Wrenn Goodfellow’s beliefs contained a hub of fakery around which she’d built a good chunk of her life. Was it Ed’s job to rip down the façade? Maybe. Maybe not. But he was a hothead, and like she said, Frank was his friend.
“You think Frank tried to drown you?” He laughed again. “Frank, who has lived with the elves since that ice thing with your fa—Victor Frankenstein? Frank’s a teddy bear.” A preoccupied teddy bear, but still a teddy bear.
“His name is Frank?” she asked.
Had she calmed down? “Yes,” he answered. “He did not try to drown you, Wrenn of the fae. I will stake my reputation on that.” Of course he didn’t know for sure if it was a lie. How could he? But he had a pretty good sense of human behavior. “Do you really think the elves of Alfheim would have adopted a murderer?”
She rolled her eyes.
He realized immediately the hypocrisy of his statement. “Those two vampires were an experiment. The elves wanted to see if they could help them be better. They did, for seventy years. Then…” He waved his hand toward the coast. “The point is that we all knew what those two vampires were, but the elves, they had to try. We all know what Frank is, too. There’s no need to try, with him.”
Her lips thinned. “I have Victor’s notes. His logs. I have proof.”
Ed threw his hands into the air. “Did the fae get those for you?” She sure was holding on tight to those beliefs, wasn’t she? “Because something tells me you’re firmly under the thumb of your precious King Oberon.”
She pushed by him. “I have a kelpie to bring in.”
“A kelpie who just happened to help you steal an elven artifact that’s talking up Ragnarok, for Odin’s sake! And drops you into Alfheim? Where your brother Victor told you is a monster just happens to live? Right after we have a fae problem?” A fae problem that probably involved Frank in the first place.
Ed pushed by Wrenn. “You are being played,” he said. Fae always played. “Stay away from my kids!” he roared. The elves were enough. He didn’t need his own fae problem.
A whooping roar echoed between the walls.
A helicopter.
No lights were visible in the sky, and with the trees muffling and distorting sound, Ed had no way to tell where the copter was. It wasn’t nearby, that was for sure. “That sounded about a mile away,” he said.
Wrenn climbed up into a hollow in the old mission’s walls. She tested the adobe on either side, chose the west side, and jumped for the broken top of the wall.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She hung from the side of the wall, now a good seven feet off the ground, and hand-over-handed her way toward the taller, sturdier corner of the old building. “I might be able to see Ranger’s magic from up here.”
Or that damned sword. “I think it came from the east.” Which meant the coast.
Wrenn’s hand slipped. Pebbles dropped to the dirt. She kicked her foot into the adobe as if she were digging into a cupcake.
“Careful,” Ed said.
“Yes, Dad,” she responded as she pulled herself up to the top of the broken adobe wall.
Wrenn crouched a good fifteen feet up on the old mission’s corner like some black clad superhero. She gripped the wall with one hand and shielded her eyes from the starlight with the other.
The copter’s engine shutting down echoed through the area.
“There!” She pointed due east, toward the coast, as he suspected. “Lights. Magic, too.”
Ed hopped up on the hollow and did his best to see over the trees. There was definitely a glow that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“There’s a helicopter!” Wrenn jumped the full fifteen feet down from the wall. She landed, skipped, and rolled like some parkour jumper who knew exactly what they were doing. “Try to keep up, lawman,” she said, and darted into the trees.
She’d outstrip him with her longer legs even if he kept pace. “I’m the one with the gun!” he called.
She didn’t even look back.
He’d pissed her off with his comments about Frank and Victor Frankenstein. Here he was in the scrub brush in a South Texas wildlife reserve with a fae version of Frank Victorsson—because she was Frank’s sister, no matter how much she wanted to argue about it—and he’d made her mad enough that she’d left him behind.