By TA Moore
All Conri wanted was to drop his kid off at Changeling camp, find the nearest halfway nice hotel, and enjoy a week of uncomplicated debauchery. It should be simple. It doesn’t work out that way.
When a local girl disappears, the neighborhood quickly lays blame at the well-guarded gates of the camp. With his son incriminated, a mystery to solve, and a malevolent pocket of the Otherworld to navigate, Conri will need all the help he can get—even if it does come from a distractingly pretty, tightly wound Iron Door agent who doesn’t trust Conri to be on the right side.
To my mum, who always encouraged me to have my head in the clouds. And to the Five, who told me to stop messing around and get my fingers on a keyboard.
IT WAS always—always—in the name.
They made no attempt to hide it, and yet, as it always was, their very openness served to deceive. We knew it, of course we did after so many years, but…. But. They gave us back our children. How could we look that gift horse in the mouth? Even now I don’t see what else we could have done, but we should have known.
Because what they took. They changed.
What they took were children. What they gave back were changelings.
-- The Honorable Andrew Boyd, the American Ambassador-at-Large to the Courts of the Otherworld
“UGH,” FINN groaned. He rested his head against the window and glowered at the town as they drove through. “Just when I thought camp couldn’t get any worse, they go and make it redneck. We’re going to have classes in marrying our sisters and how to chew tobacco in company.”
Raising a fey child was a waiting process. Wait to see if the cellophane thing of thorn bones and rose-petal skin that you’re given survives the first harsh winter. Wait for it to grow out of the homely and unwholesome years (fingers crossed it would), and then hope against hope that it would become, at least vaguely, less of an asshole.
Conri glanced at Finn out of the corner of his eye. So far his kid had made it through stage one and… most of stage two. All Conri needed now was for Finn to act like a fourteen-year-old and not a feral marten found in a tree stump.
Goals. Every parent should have them.
“I believe the proper term is ‘bakky,’” Conri said dryly. “And you don’t have any siblings.”
“Yeah, don’t remind me. I’m socially stunted because I’m an only child,” Finn groused. “And whose fault is that, Conri?”
Conri took his eyes off the narrow road long enough to give Finn an exasperated look.
“Well, it’s not mine.”
“Oh, right,” Finn muttered as he tucked his chin down and scowled out at the world through copper-red curls. “Throw it in my face that I’m adopted the minute I don’t do what you want. That’s A-plus parenting, Conri. My future therapist wants to send you a thank-you card.”
To be honest, Conri had thought he needed to downgrade his expectations for Finn. Maybe he should give up on “able to socially pass as a person” and aim for “domesticated marten.”
“Don’t tell me your real dad wouldn’t treat you this way,” Conri said.
“Well, he wouldn’t.”
“No. He’d have turned you into a tree and left you for the first stray princess to take on as a project.”
“At least he wouldn’t abandon me in the wilderness once a year so he could go and lay some pipe.”
Conri grimaced. He’d tried his best to adapt to life in LA, but he was still a priest-fearing Cornish boy at heart. Some things he didn’t want to hear out of his fourteen-year-old ward.
“It’s the law.”
“It used to be the law that you threw changelings in a roaring fire,” Finn said. “Would you have done that too?”
“Some days,” Conri muttered under his breath.
“I heard that.”
Of course he did. Conri considered an apology, but they’d been in the car for fourteen hours straight. He was going to give himself a mulligan on that one. The rental GPS came to life all of a sudden and told him to turn left on Naecross Road.
Conri swore to himself as he leaned forward over the wheel to peer at the sun-faded street names on the sides of buildings.
Kendall.
Rowan.
Nail and Cross.
Shit.
He spun the wheel to take the corner tightly and then hit the brakes as he nearly plowed into the thin woman halfway across the pedestrian crossing. The car screeched to a halt inches away from faded jeans, and the woman glared at them with dull, small-town suspicion.
“Sorry,” Conri said as he stuck his head out the window. It was hot, the sort of hot that hit you like a slap. “GPS. Do you know where the Kemp Farm is from here?”
“I do.”
Conri stared at her for a second, then grinned thinly.
“Not going to tell us, though,” he said. “Right?”
She spat on the hood of the car, her candy-pink lips pursed with ripe disgust.
“This is a good, church-going town,” she said. “Barry Kemp should be downright ashamed he signed that contract. We don’t want you around here. You ain’t welcome. Ain’t that supposed to mean something to you people?”
Finn stuck his head out his side. “No, see, you’re thinking vampires,” he said in his thickest Cali drawl, maliciously helpful and syrup sweet. “Have to be invited? Don’t like garlic? Fey don’t like iron and small-minded, smaller-town bit—”
His insult was cut off as Conri grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt and yanked him back into the car. He jabbed his finger on the button to roll the window up before Finn could squirm loose, but it was a bit late. The woman had definitely already heard, her ears gone so red they glowed through her bleached-blond hair. Ah well, Conri had tried. The world couldn’t ask more of him.
“Go to the farm and rot there,” the woman spat at them. “We’re not going to stand for the soulless to be brought amongst us like this. Everyone knows what happens to towns that make the likes of you welcome!”
She slapped the hood of the car and stomped off.
Finn watched her go and then turned to glower at Conri. He didn’t say anything, just gestured extravagantly after her with one arm. As if the departing Uggs spoke for themselves. Conri supposed he might have a point, not that he would admit it.
“She could have just been homophobic,” Conri said.
“Sure,” Finn said with an exaggerated roll of spring-leaf-green eyes as he flopped back into his seat. “One look at you and what jumped out at her was that you were gay. Not the rest of it.”
Conri glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror and snorted his admission that Finn was right. The piebald hair and mismatched eyes might pass for human, at a quick glance, but the pricked, tufted ears that poked through his hair were less so. Some changelings used glamours to hide what they were, but he rarely bothered. There were many ways to see through it, and once people did, they assumed that you had something else to hide too.
Besides, he’d already lost one face. The one he wore as a boy was long since forgotten, so he didn’t want to let this one slip. It might not be what he started with, but he’d had it the longest.
“So there’s a few bigots,” he admitted as he checked for pedestrians before he rolled the car forward. “Maybe that’s why they brought the camp here this year—so you kids learn to deal with them. It’s not like you can depend on always living in LA.”
“Yeah, because no one ever calls me Oberon there,” Finn said, with the ripe contempt for a parent who didn’t understand the microaggressions only a fourteen-year-old could muster.
Conri shrugged.
He’d been one of the last waves of changelings handed back—the fourth? fifth?—and for humanity, the joy of their return had worn off to reveal the suspicion underneath. “Oberon” was a helluva lot better than what he’d been called back then. The West Coast might love the idea of the fey more than the reality—who didn’t?—but it treated them well. But as far as Conri could tell, progress was surviving long enough that your kids could be angry about the stuff you’d had to shrug off.
“It’s three weeks,” he said. “You’ll survive.”
“You hope.”
“Yeah, sometimes,” Conri said.
He ignored Finn’s aggrieved snort and followed the GPS’s directions, which brought him back to the first street, three blocks back. The camp staff had turned the scramblers on early—again—though nobody was going to have a clue how to get there. Every year. Conri swore they did it to agitate people.
“Da,” Finn said abruptly. He poked Conri’s arm with a bony finger and then pointed down the street. “There they are.”
A convoy of jet-black SUVs with blacked-out windows and no license plates pulled out of a gas station and headed north along Main Street, out of town. The Federal and Otherworld Bureau, or the Templars, if you wanted to be crude. FOBs if you were cocky.
“Tell you what,” Conri said as he turned into a diner parking lot. “You want to get lunch first?”
For once Finn didn’t have a smart remark. He sighed in relief and nodded as he unsnapped his seat belt.
The FOBs weren’t necessarily bad news, but they were news. If you could, it was best to stay out of their way and off everyone’s radar. Besides, Conri could always eat.
Well, he supposed as he got out of the car and squinted at the aggressively mom-and-pop frontage, if they’d serve the likes of him here.
THREE DAYS later Conri sprawled naked on the balcony of the nicest hotel in the nearest big city he could find. He still received suspicious squints occasionally, as if they needed to check the human under the elf-gift, but so far no one had caused trouble. It hadn’t put off anyone at the clubs either.
He stretched, long and lazy and sated in the sun, and reached for the glass of wine. It wasn’t as if he didn’t date or fuck around with Finn at home, but there were… constraints. Even before he’d spent all those years in the Otherworld, he’d bristled at any attempt to control him.
That independent streak had never actually done him any favors, he supposed as he took a draft of wine and tilted his head back, but he seemed to be stuck with it.
His phone trilled a sharp, barely audible whine that made Conri’s ears twitch. It was Finn’s ringtone, the only one in his phone guaranteed to poke through the haze of whatever Conri was doing and grab his attention. A dog whistle, basically.
He scrambled up off the lounger and loped back into the hotel room. His clothes were tossed haphazardly over the furniture, but he finally found his phone shoved into the toe of his trainer.
“What is it?” he barked as he swiped to answer the call. It was something. Finn wouldn’t have called him otherwise. “What happened?”
Someone sniffed wetly on the other end of the line. For a second, Conri thought someone else had Finn’s phone. Finn was fourteen and aggressively aware of his own dignity. He didn’t cry in front of—for—Conri.
“Da,” Finn said. He exhaled raggedly, and Conri heard fabric slide down a wall until the lanky teen wearing it thumped onto the floor. He sniffed again. “I’m sorry I was a jerk, Da. I was lucky my father gave me to you and… and it’s okay you never got me a dog. It would have been weird.”
He swallowed hard and wiped his nose on something—his sleeve, from experience.
“Finn, enough,” Conri said, his voice flat and impatient. He pinned the phone against his ear with one shoulder as he grabbed a pair of jeans that were more or less clean. “What happened?”
There was a pause, and then Finn admitted in a tight voice. “I don’t know. Not exactly. The Templars have closed the camp. I tried to find out why, but they wouldn’t tell me. I’m the son of—”
Conri snapped his teeth together, a sharp click that shut Finn up midword. It gave Conri notice that his temper had started to slip too. He licked the back of his teeth smooth again.
“You’re fourteen,” he said. “You’re better off if you don’t know some things. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You think you’re safe?”
He listened to Finn’s breathing, ragged and frightened in his ear for a long moment. There was no blood relation between them, not even a common ancestor six hundred years back, and one day Finn’s real father would come to take him back. Once all the hard work was done. That mattered, and it didn’t. Right now, Conri was all Finn had in the world, and he needed to get to him.
“Finnigan,” he said. “You’re not safe?”
“No. Maybe? I don’t know,” Finn’s voice was quiet now, a muffled whisper as though he’d cupped his hand over his mouth. “They took some of the older kids to talk to them. I haven’t seen any of them come back. Da, what if they’re going to take us all away?”
Conri buttoned his jeans and grabbed a T-shirt. It tangled around his hands, the simple task of arm and head holes suddenly impossible to surmount. His head felt narrow with the slow thud of anxiety. After they were sent back, there had been a few choke points where it seemed something like this was bound to happen. There had been plans—fragile lines of communication between people divided by courts and gifts and stuff the humans would never understand.
That had passed. Things had gotten better. It had been years since Conri worried about what he’d do if armed soldiers came for Finn.
“They won’t,” he said and hoped it wasn’t a lie. “Did something happen to kick this off?”
“… we snuck out of camp last night,” Finn admitted. “We—a bunch of us—were going to go to a party. Da, I didn’t know…. The Templars met us at the gate when we got back. It was a bit of fun.”
Conri felt like he needed to sit down and put his head between his knees as relief hit him like a brick. He doubted that Finn would appreciate it, under the circumstances, but that was good news. Whatever had happened sounded like it was local, a reaction to some bone-headed kids feeling their oats, not the first step in a nationwide countdown.
He hoped.
“Did anything happen? Anyone get out of hand? Or get their hands caught somewhere they shouldn’t be.”
“I don’t know. I got drunk and passed out. I only woke up when we got back here and they turned the floodlights on us. It could have? The locals have been assholes, so when some of the older kids found out about the party, they decided to crash it. Play Stranger at the Feast. I just tagged along, Da. I didn’t do—”
He stopped, and his breath hitched raggedly in his throat. In the background Conri could hear a door handle rattle and the sound of heavy, human boots against linoleum and cheap creaky joists. Finn’s hand tightened around his phone so much that his knuckles creaked. Or that could be Conri’s own fingers. He loosened his grip as he grabbed what he needed from the suitcase and the car fob from the nightstand and headed for the door.
The rest he could get when he came back.
Finn swallowed hard—a wet click in his throat—and took a shallow breath. “I don’t think they want parents to know what’s going on. They won’t let any of the other kids use the camp phone to call home, and the counselors took our phones and everything when we arrived. But you told me I should keep my burner in case. Da, what if they come for me? Or for the little kids? Should we try and get out?”
“No. Do what you’re told,” Conri told him. “You haven’t done anything wrong, so you don’t have anything to hide. Even if you did do something wrong, that’s the story you stick to.”
“That doesn’t sound like what a hero would do,” Finn said. “Or a lord.”
“Yeah, well, you’d be surprised what gets left out once something turns into a story.” Conri ducked into the elevator and pretended he didn’t see the middle-aged couple’s agitated jab at the Close button. “And you aren’t either yet, Finn. Now keep your head down and a polite tongue in your head. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“When?”
“Soon,” Conri promised grimly. “I’m taking the long way round.”
OLD WIVES knew that time passed faster in the Otherworld. Conri was too much of a gentleman to argue with them, but they were only close. Time didn’t pass at all in the Otherworld. It’s why the fey liked mortals. They brought time with them. It stirred the waters.
Sometimes boys joined the fairy ring to dance a reel with a handsome fey, only to wake in the morning well used, with a purse of coin and half a century frittered away. Others the youngest daughter finished their quest and found themselves back home the same night they left, those sixty years squashed back into sixteen-year-old skin.
If someone knew how to read the tides, then they could use the silted-up shallows of the Otherworld as a rat run from somewhere to somewhen.
Conri knew how to do it.
As far as the odometer was concerned, they’d covered the same amount of miles as the trip would take in the real world. More, since the Otherworld’s topography hadn’t caught up with the human world yet. It was still based on the potholed highways and cracked back roads of the 1950s. Conri’s ass ached and his throat was parched despite the bottle of water he’d stolen from the creepy, kudzu-buried gas station he passed a few miles back. It had been too long since he’d lived on Otherworld fare. His body had forgotten how to make do with the thinness of it.
A hitchhiker paused on the side of the road to watch him go by, shabby jeans and a denim jacket under a faded backpack. Ragged blond hair hung still around their face despite the wind that kicked up dust and ragged bits of stick. It didn’t bother to try and wave Conri down, it could tell he was meant to be there.
Sometimes Conri could too. Still.
He brushed that thought away like a cobweb and leaned forward to squint out the bug-covered window for the turnoff to Elwood. If he missed it, he’d be stuck on the road for another day maybe. Despite the empty road, there were no U-turns in the Otherworld. Or more accurately, no take-backs. If someone regretted something—a missed turn, a missed opportunity, a murder—they could find a work-around, but it couldn’t be undone.
And the GPS was no help. It had spent an hour trying to direct him to the second level of Hell—head straight for Gehenna and turn left at Limbo—before it eroded into static and eerie whispers that made fractured promises and threats. So he wasn’t going to depend on it.
The turnoff appeared out of nowhere, disguised by dust and the angle of the road. Conri yanked the wheel and felt the weight of the car as it swerved under him. The front tire slipped off the crumbled tarmac into the dirt with a jolt—and a sudden sense of something along the road that waited for people who left it—and then bumped back up again.
He was nearly back. Conri could feel the weight of the mortal world pull at his human bones as he got closer to the boundary. Not far now. He reached over to check the map he’d tossed onto the passenger side and took his eyes off the road for a second.
When he looked back up, the man was already halfway into the road. Conri caught a snapshot of dark hair and torn black clothes—was that a sword in his hand?—and the bumper of the car clipped the man and flipped him up into the air. He landed on the hood with a crack that made Conri wince and then grabbed blindly at the top of it. His knuckles showed white through abraded skin as he grabbed at the lip.
“Go,” the stranger yelled roughly as he waved his free hand at the road. “Move now.”
That’s when Conri saw the hounds. They were lean and white, built of mist and bone, with red ears where their bloody-handed masters had ruffled them in approval. The road was new to them, and it gave them pause, paws raised prissily as they poked at the concrete, but only for a second. Then they lunged out into the road after their prey in long, ground-devouring leaps.
“Shit.”
Conri hit the gas and plowed through them. The hounds shrieked as they bounced off the metal and rolled into the road, long red grazes on their haunches and shoulders. It wouldn’t kill them, but they might remember it.
One managed to grab hold of the rearview mirror. Sharp, yellow teeth punched through the fiberglass like tinfoil and the glass shattered. The hound snarled around the mouthful and glared at Conri out of a mad, yellow eye.
“I’ll remember you,” that glare said.
Then they hit the border. The hound’s long body stretched out like a ribbon in the wind, bone ribs sharp as they tore through mist-made skin. It tried to keep up, but hounds weren’t one of the things that could pass through the borders. Not alone.
It unspooled, and the car smashed back into the real world, heat like a slap and the stink of hot concrete and wet, boiled earth thick in the air. Conri hit the brakes hard, and the car fishtailed under him. His passenger lost his grip and was thrown off the car. He hit the road hard and rolled.
Conri sat for a second and panted as he waited to reacclimate. He could have left—he considered it. Some black-clad stranger who was stupid enough to wander into the Otherland wasn’t his problem.
Then the man propped himself up on one elbow and wiped blood from his mouth. Dark hair hung in front of his face, and that seemed as far as he could go. Conri tapped his fingers nervously on the wheel and then swore to himself as he scrambled out of the car.
The hounds couldn’t cross the border on their own, but plenty of things could bring them over.
IT WASN’T the first time that Special Agent Dylan Bellamy had been unceremoniously thrown out of faerie, and he doubted it would be the last. The fey might have put their mark on the Accords and bound themselves, but the place had made no such promises. It still wanted to have its fun, and it didn’t appreciate any mortal interference.
But it was the first time he had gone face-to-face with a Toyota.
Bell swallowed a mouthful of blood, slick and salty in his throat, and appreciated the bright, midmorning sun as it stabbed into his aching eyes. It was always dusk or dawn in the Otherworld, never in-between. Once he was fully reassured he was home, he took a quick inventory of his state. Nothing was broken, and all his extremities were there. But the thicket of tightly woven branches and thorny runners he’d had to fight his way through had taken its toll on his skin before the hounds had their pound of flesh.
He had to get up, but there was nothing about to kill him right this minute, and the hot gut sickness of the border twisted his stomach like a rag. A minute, he swore as he pressed his knuckles against his forehead, and then he’d get back to work.
Hounds. Bell wiped his mouth on his sleeve and managed to drag himself onto his knees. What the fuck were hounds doing out here, in the most mundane hollow of the States the Agency could find?
“Come on,” someone said as they put a lean warm arm around his waist and dragged him to his feet. “I’ll get you to town, find somewhere to get you patched up.”
Cars, Bell reminded himself scathingly as he stiffened his knees, tended to be driven.
Pride did what the threat of death hadn’t, and Bell squashed the sickness and the pain down into the box in his head where it belonged. He’d deal with it later. Or not. He got his feet under him and took his weight off his rescuer’s shoulders.
“Thanks for the help,” he said, his voice clipped and cold. “But I can take it from here, Mr.….”
He limped a step back and paused as he took in the fact that his Good Samaritan wasn’t human. Not entirely. Not anymore.
Pointed ears stuck up through his shaggy, roughly cut hair that was blotched with gray and white over the ginger base. His too-bright, mismatched eyes looked starkly inhuman in his broad, handsome, and casually human face.
Cute, huh, a stupid little voice whispered in the back of his head. Bell smothered it impatiently to shut it up. It wasn’t wrong, but this wasn’t the time.
The changeling, having given Bell the same once-over, looked vaguely stricken.
“Fuck,” he said. “You’re Iron Door.”
Bell glanced down at himself. The muddy Kevlar vest that spelled out his affiliation in stark white letters did kind of give that away. The changeling was also dressed like someone from his decade. Other than the stamp of the elf-gift on his face, he looked like any other guy buying hipster veg at the farmer’s market. His jeans were faded by design, not work, and his old green T-shirt had a quote from a Dua Lipa song on it.
Which explained his dismay. One of the rules that repatriated changelings agreed to when they got back was that they didn’t go to the Otherworld without oversight from Iron Door.
“Is that a problem?” Bell asked quietly. He reached for his sap on his belt and then remembered he’d dropped it sometime between when the car hit him and he hit the road. That left the gun.
The Changeling glanced up and met his eyes for a second. One of his mismatched eyes was a bright electric blue and the other soulful amber. Neither had any white visible.
“You tell me,” he said.
His body language was relaxed, hands loose and shoulders down. It was a deliberately unthreatening stance, assumed to look harmless, but Bell couldn’t blame him for that.
“Open the trunk,” Bell said.
The Changeling looked… tired… but walked back to the car and leaned in to do as he was told. Bell kept an eye on him as he edged around the car. He’d popped the trunk open, and Bell lifted it up cautiously to check inside.
There was a dirty sock wedged between the back of the seats and half a bag of trail mix spilled over the carpet. It smelled of old clothes and Axe body spray. Not exactly how Bell would imagine the changeling smelled—grass, lemons, and clean sweat apparently, so he could thank his brain for that—but not illegal.
“Stand at the side of the road,” he said. “Where I can see you.”
“Maybe not a great idea to hang out here,” the Changeling pointed out as he backed up to the side of the road. He leaned against a tree and crossed his arms, all long legs and patience. It should have looked relaxed, but he looked alert instead. “It’s a weak spot.”
“I know,” Bell said. “Why do you think I headed this way?”
He checked the inside of the car. It was a quick and dirty search—under the seats, in the glove box, behind the shades—instead of the forensic exam he should have ordered. Instinct told Bell that it was clean, though. It didn’t… prickle… at his ears the way active magic did.
“Why’d you break the rules?” he asked.
The changeling shrugged without pushing himself off the tree. “Shortcut.”
“You risked prison to cut a few hours off your trip?” Bell leaned against the side of the car and reached around to press his hand over his bicep where the hound’s teeth had dug in. Blood welled between his fingers, and he resisted the urge to take a proper look. It was always easier if you didn’t look at it. “Hot date?”
The changeling blinked and then grimaced wryly, as if he’d remembered something. “No, that was actually later on. I should call and let him know I won’t make it.”
He. Bell tried to pretend he hadn’t filed that away for later. It didn’t work. He could feel it as his interest went from cute to possible. He clenched his teeth and snorted to himself. His arm had been used for dog chew, and he still had an eye out for a date? With someone who was possibly a criminal, if an unusually easygoing one.
Not to mention the other issues. It wasn’t exactly forbidden to fraternize with changelings, but it wasn’t encouraged either. Conflict of interest and all that.
None of that would fit with his reputation.
“What was so important?”
“Probably the same thing that took you over the border,” the changeling said after a second. He pushed himself off the tree and waited expectantly until a nod from Bell gave him permission to walk back to the car. “My son’s at camp. He called me earlier.”
Bell scowled in irritation. “He’s not supposed to have a phone.”
“He’s fourteen.” Apparently that was enough explanation. “Do you want a ride or not? We’re going to the same place, I’d guess, and I’ve already hit you with my car. How much worse can it get?”
The laugh caught Bell off guard. It felt rusty in his throat, but it had been a while. He glanced down at his arm, blood bright on his fingers, and felt the dull pressure of vertigo throb against his inner ear. It wasn’t the worst injury he’d ever had, but something about the loose, crumpled strips of skin turned his stomach. He looked away again.
“Good point. You know where the camp is?” Bell asked as he swallowed the nausea and limped around to the passenger side. The seat was a bit too far forward. It pushed his knees against the dashboard, but he wasn’t going to move it with his jacked-up arm.
“I found it last time. Eventually.” The changeling climbed into the car and closed the door. He glanced sidelong at Bell from under the tangle of Collie dog hair as he started the engine. “And it’s Conri.”
“Drive, Mr. Conri,” Bell said flatly.
“Just Conri,” he said and then hit the gas.
THE SKINNY, red-haired kid shuffled resentfully through the door, all straggly hair and bones that he didn’t have quite enough meat for. His long thin face was pinched in sullen lines, and he looked like a troublemaker. Not a ringleader, but the sort of kid who started fires and stole wallets to buy beer.
Then he saw Conri, and all the tension bled out of him. He was still a goblin-looking kid, but a desperately relieved one, all of a sudden.
“Da,” he blurted and threw himself across the room into Conri’s arms. He buried his face in Conri’s broad shoulder and wrapped skinny arms around him. “I don’t know what happened. I swear.”
The head of the camp—Dr. Gwen Cordwainer, who’d been at Langley before she transferred to Iron Door after the Return—cleared her throat.
“That’s what everyone is saying, Finn,” she said in a smooth, modulated voice that meant it was “on.” “But someone must have seen something.”
Conri rubbed a big hand over Finn’s skinny back and lifted his head to give Cordwainer a long, steady look. It made the hair on the back of Bell’s neck raise, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw his SSA shift his weight slightly so he’d have a good shot if something went wrong.
“Someone ain’t him,” Conri said flatly. “He doesn’t know what you want. So move on.”
“With all due respect,” SSA Felix Donnelly said. “You don’t know what’s happened yet. So how can you know what we need?”
“People say that,” Conri said. “All due respect, I mean, when they don’t think you’re due any.”
“That’s not what he meant,” Cordwainer interrupted. “Mr. Conri—”
“Just Conri.”
It had left Bell off-balance earlier. He was gratified to see it threw Cordwainer, briefly, off script as well.
“Please,” she said. “Sit.”
Conri cocked his head to the side. “Are you being funny?” he asked.
When Cordwainer realized what she’d said, color flooded her face, hot and dark under her makeup, and she spluttered for a second. She was excellent at what she did, but she rarely dealt with changelings one-on-one. It didn’t help that Conri made no apparent effort to make himself look more human.
“I certainly didn’t—”
Felix snorted. “Sit or stand, it’s your call,” he told Conri and then glanced at Cordwainer. “And we have bigger problems than the fact your staff can’t outwit teenagers, Doctor. So drop it.”
Cordwainer glared at him. Scuttlebutt had it she didn’t like Felix. But few people did. He’d got as far as he was because he was very good at his job, and he stalled there for the same reason.
“What is the problem?” Conri asked. He peeled Finn off him and nudged the boy into one of the chairs while he stayed on his feet. “I know that Finn and some other kids snuck out—”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Finn objected. Under Conri’s quick glare, he slouched down in the seat and fiddled with the ragged hem of his T-shirt. He muttered under his breath, “Well, you made it sound like my idea, and it wasn’t.”
“We know that,” Felix said. “It was Robin Mell’s idea, but unfortunately we can’t find him to ask him anything. Or… Thistle Graves, Shanko Deeds, and Annie Boot either. So that leaves us you and the others who made it back to camp. Only apparently none of you saw anything.”
Finn hunched in on himself, more angle and points than seemed natural under his black clothes. He looked up at Conri pleadingly. “I swear, Da, I don’t remember. It was a party, that’s all, nothing bad happened. I had a couple of drinks of punch, and it made me feel sick, so I went to sleep in the back of the van. Next thing I know we were back here, and the FOBs all had sticks up their asses all of a sudden.”
It sounded true, but Bell had missed the first round of interviews. As soon as they reached the camp, Felix had sent him out on recon. The other kids’ stories could be just as believable and paint Finn as the bad guy.
Bell glanced at Conri’s hand on Finn’s shoulder, the scarred knuckles and steady reassurance, and hoped not. Stupid, but it would be nice to see someone’s faith turn out to be justified.
“I thought the fey could hold their liquor,” Felix said.
Conri snorted. “No, you didn’t. Now, is anyone going to tell me what actually happened?”
They didn’t have to. Any crimes that touched the Otherworld came under Iron Door’s jurisdiction. Eventually they might have to explain themselves, but no one could interfere in the middle of their investigation.
Felix studied Conri and Finn for a moment, his expression set and hard to read.
“The problem is that, right now, you know pretty much everything we do,” he said eventually in a hard voice. “Robin Mell and a group of kids from camp snuck out to go to this party. Now four of them are missing, and no one seems to have seen anything out of the ordinary.”
“And what don’t I know?”
Bell rubbed his bandaged arm as he spoke up. It had been his job to make this bit of information outdated, but he hadn’t pulled it off.
“A local girl has gone missing too,” he said. “Stolen away to faerie. The first in twenty years, since the Accord was signed.”
Finn was too ginger to have much color, but he still managed to lose what he had. He was gray as he looked around the room.
“I didn’t know anything about that.” He reached up and clutched at Conri’s hand. “Da, I swear nobody said anything about—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Conri said grimly. “Whether you all knew or not, if the girl is in the Otherworld by anything other than chance….”
“Then the Accord has been violated,” Felix finished. “With everything that entails.”
THE GIRL.
Nora Kessel, seventeen years old and inexplicably nondescript. The details made her sound like she had it all going for her—tall, blond, blue-eyed, and slim. In the photos her dad and the school provided, it was obvious she was too tall, too thin, and her eyes weren’t blue enough, while her hair was too blond.
She wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t pretty either. Instead she was just there in photos, with a challenging expression on her face as if she dared whoever was behind the lens to take a good shot.
Bell didn’t know why, but he had the strong feeling he’d like her. He laid the photo back down on the desk.
“Is there any reason to think she was targeted?” he asked.
The fey took who they wanted—a midwife to nurse their newborns, a drunk who’d staggered through a fairy ring, or a lawyer who’d slighted them. They sought out—or had, before the long conflict had finally ground to a brutal, exhausted halt—the exceptional. Beauty, talent, wisdom, or wealth—the fey liked to pluck them up and put them in pride of place.
Conri had probably stumbled into the Otherworld by chance, Bell mused absently. He was handsome enough, but the fey tended to prefer pretty to rugged. They kept their pets human too, in appearance, at least. Alterations as extensive as Conri’s suggested that he hadn’t been a prize.
“I doubt it,” Felix said as he unfastened his bulletproof vest and squirmed out of it. His T-shirt rode up as he did it, revealing the weft of old scar tissue that clotted on his stomach. The official party line was that humanity had won, and the fey had been brought to heel. Most people believed it, but it didn’t take long on the front lines to realize it hadn’t been nearly that clean… or that clean-cut. “Proficient and hard-working is how people describe her, and nice if you press them.”
“Nothing wrong with nice.”
“Not to us maybe,” Felix said as he propped his hip up on the windowsill, his booted foot dangling off the ground. “But it’s not a trait the fey admire. Did you find any trace of the missing kids on the other side?”
Bell gingerly lowered himself into the chair. It had hurt when he hit the road, but as the kick of adrenaline faded, he picked up new aches and pains. They’d fade once the faerie salve soaked through his skin, but until then, he’d ache and smell of aniseed and lunary.
“Nothing. No dropped beads, torn clothes, or bits of hair,” he said as he stretched his legs out in front of him. His left knee popped, but that was nothing new. Bell had joined Iron Door a decade after the Accord was signed, so he’d never had to face down elf knights with nothing but bad attitude, a mouthful of blood, and a crowbar. But even without the fey to deal with, the Otherworld had plenty to throw at them. “Do schools not teach kids to pull a Hansel the minute they’re grabbed anymore?”
It was a facetious question. Bell was surprised when Felix twisted his mouth and shook his head.
“Irrelevant to a curriculum in dire need of modernization,” he quoted dryly as he crossed his arms. “I believe most places replaced it with sex ed, which will come in handy if this does break the Accord.”
Bell shifted uncomfortably. He could feel his torn skin as it knit back together under his bandages, and it had the same prickly discomfort/satisfaction as a picked scab.
“Will it come to that?” he asked. “After all this time, all the blood shed to get that thing signed, would we really go back to war over one girl? Who might not even have been taken by the fey.”
“It was always over one girl, or one boy,” Felix said. “It was about every single child that was taken. So yes, if we don’t find Nora, it could mean war. Or worse. There are people—plenty of people—who think we gave too many concessions in the Accord. Who think we were the ones who set the terms. This would give them the opportunity to roll a lot of them back.”
The sound of children as they shrieked in laughter and kicked a ball around the yard filtered in through the window. Bell watched them. They weren’t human children. That was obvious at a glance—too skinny, too fast, too fey. Still children.
“What about them?” he asked. “The changelings.”
Felix ignored the question. They both already knew the answer. Bell could remember the Return. Parents had been elated to get their children back, grown grandchildren had been awkwardly awed to grip their grandmother’s unlined hands, and then there were the rest—the ones whose families were long dead, who didn’t know how to drive cars or use the internet, who hadn’t wanted to come back. People were a lot less elated then.
“We need to find the missing children,” Felix told him as he levered himself up out of the window. “Then none of us will have to deal with what-ifs. But it needs to be done quickly. Once people catch wind this has happened, it won’t take long before both sides are setting fires.”
Of course, the changelings had missing children too. Bell had seen the way Conri gripped his son’s shoulder. He supposed the others also had people who loved them. Their situation was less dire—the Otherworld already had its stamp on them—but they still needed to come home.
“What about extra manpower?” Bell asked as he sat forward. They had men here, but just because you were Iron Door didn’t mean you were a Templar. The fey could take anyone, or anything they wanted, but humans could only cross at certain times or when they met certain random criteria. The seventh son of a seventh son, the descendants of someone the fey had blessed—or cursed—the caul-born, and anyone who’d died of hanging or drowning. Iron Door aggressively recruited anyone who qualified, but there were still only a handful of them in each state. “The Other Side here is a slough, cut off and left to go fallow. There’s only one ford in and out, so it’s a killing ground there for anything smart enough.”
Felix raised his eyebrows. “You think that’s why you ran into the hounds? Because it’s good hunting. Or were they on guard?”
“I don’t know,” Bell said. He scratched his arm and felt the dull bruise of nearly healed pain. “It doesn’t really matter. I can fend for myself, but if I have a half-dozen kids in tow, it’s not going to be so easy.”
“Then stick to one,” Felix said flatly. “Once we stop this from escalating, we can go back for the rest.”
Bell grimaced and tilted his head back against the seat. “So no backup?”
“Not everyone wants to stop this escalating,” Felix pointed out. “They can’t stop me getting my own men here, but they can slow it down. I’ll cover you when you get back, but I can’t cross over.”
That had been written into the Accord by the fey themselves, in a neat, scratchy script at the end of the document. Bell figured that was evidence enough that all the stories about Felix were actually only half of the legend. If Felix went across the border, the Accord would go up in flames.
Bell ran his fingers through his hair and found burrs from his last trip worked deep into the unruly waves. He picked them out and stuck them in his pocket to get rid of properly later.
“So, I’m on my own,” he said. “Well, why change the habit of a lifetime?”
HE’D BE informed if anything else changed, Cordwainer had told him as two Iron Door guards politely waited to escort him out of the camp. Until then he was welcome to stay in town, with the unsaid rider that he had to find somewhere to stay in town.
Conri had hugged Finn and let them give him the bum’s rush. He’d be of more use doing something out here than locked up behind the camp’s walls, and—let’s be honest—if things did kick off, Finn would be safer under Templar guard.
For now.
It didn’t take him long to find some of the local kids who’d been at the party when it was crashed. Elwood might not be a particularly tolerant town, but backwoods teenagers still watched TV and dreamed of going to LA or New York. The more their parents told them to stay away from the kids at the camp, the more intrigued they were about changelings and magic and what it had been like to be stolen away by the fey.
Conri wasn’t about to tell them—it might be a shitty story, but it was his. As long as they told him what he needed to know, they could write all the romantic fanfic about him they wanted.
None of them remembered much, and nothing they did remember explained how everything had gotten so dramatically out of hand. They’d all been happy to blame it—whatever it ended up being—on the kid who’d hosted the party. Jamie Treva lived in a farm just outside of town, and his parents had gone to New York for their anniversary.
Conri stood at the Treva gate and sniffed the air. Cows and grass and gas—anchored, mortal smells. No hint of anything wild and strange that had leaked through from the Otherworld.
The dog chained up in the yard growled at him, a basso rumble of fear-threat from deep in its chest, as it stared fixedly at Conri. People always thought dogs would like him, but they did not. He supposed it was the dog version of an uncanny valley—too close for comfort.
Its chain was looped around an old apple tree next to the house, the bark buckled and warped around the links, so Conri left it to swear at him as he scrambled over the gate.
When the kids in town had said it was a farm, Conri had vaguely imagined the shabby stone buildings of his childhood. The damp, dusty homes of men who got up at four and went to bed at eight, with rags of curtains that no one bothered to pull. Instead it was a box of glass and black metal, aggressively exposed and uncompromisingly modern.
Conri could see most of the ground floor as he approached, and it didn’t look like ground zero for a wild rural party. There were long, bare stretches of floor with not a misplaced cushion or discarded beer bottle in sight.
The dog threw itself at him, half strangled as it strained against its collar and gargled snarls as Conri stepped up onto the porch.
Technically Conri could understand what it was saying. In practice it was a dog, it didn’t have a lot to say. Most had the vocabulary of a sheltered four-year-old.
Get off, get off, fuck off, Go fuck away.
A sweary four-year-old.
He pressed the doorbell. It didn’t ring, but a small light in the kitchen pulsed politely to attract attention. The dog lost its mind at this further disrespect and stood on its back legs as it snarled an invite to fight it out.
Go away! Don’t touch my stuff. Fuck off. I’ll tell. I’ll tell her when she gets back. People aren’t meant to be here! Fuck off. Fuck you.
Conri winced at the noise and gave the dog an annoyed look. It was mostly legs and spots, a hound of the indiscriminate sort you found in places where they breed for soft mouths or a rabid hatred of squirrels instead of registries. It looked more pampered than most, with clipped nails and a shiny coat.
“Where’s Jamie?” he asked.
The dog fell over itself in surprise when it understood him. Not in the way it had memorized commands and remembered the savory tang of biscuit and treat, but as clearly as if Conri had barked at it.
It whuffled unhappily at him. Bad dog.
Conri growled at it for the insult, and it lifted its lip at him. Before he could press it more, a sudden explosion of sound made both of them flinch. The crack made Conri’s head ring, and he clapped his hands over his ears as he hunched down.
Thunder! The dog wailed as it tangled itself around the tree. Thunder and she isn’t here. Bad dog! Bad dog.
Not thunder. Gunfire. Conri shook his head to dislodge the noise from his eardrum and jumped off the porch to chase it back to its source. The dog barked furiously after him as he loped away.
The barn was tucked around the back of the house, down a long dirt track so it didn’t spoil the view from the kitchen. It looked more like what Conri had expected of a farm—paint peeled down to bare wood and broken windows boarded up with plywood. There were bags of empty bottles and forgotten jackets piled in the trunk of a shiny blue car that had been blocked in by a filthy old yellow pickup.
Conri slowed to a walk, and dust kicked up over his boots as he dug his heels and took in the scene.
The boy in front of the barn—a few years older than Finn but softer—was presumably Jamie Treva. He was the one with the shotgun. The yellow pickup had an irregular spray of holes punched into the back panel.
The thick-set, slightly older guy in work jeans and sweat-stained, gas-stop-branded T-shirt didn’t look impressed.
“I told you,” Jamie said. His voice cracked as he raised it, his vocal cords tight with nerves. His shirt was rumpled, the shoulder torn and buttons lost off the collar, and his eye had started to swell. “Move your damn truck, Ned.”
Ned spat in the dirt. “Make me, pixie-fucker.”
“I didn’t fucking invite them!” Jamie shouted. The barrel of the shotgun wobbled around dangerously as he got more agitated. “Someone told them about the party, and they turned up. That’s not my fault. I didn’t want them here. I told them to fuck off—”
Ned punched his fist back against the door of the pickup with a dull crack of flesh against metal.
“Did you aim a goddamn shotgun at them?” he spat. “Or did you just wake up and find your balls this morning? What the fuck happened to my sister, Jamie. Did you let them take her? Did they promise you a suck of their cocks if you got her here?”
Jamie spluttered a flushed denial, and his finger tightened on the trigger as he lifted the gun.
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
Conri sped up into a trot. Dead people only answered questions under specific conditions, and he didn’t have any favors to call in there.
“Hey,” he said, his hands held up and out and slightly in front of his face. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but he didn’t need it to work for long. “What’s going on here.”
Ned was sunbaked rather than sunburned, the sort of hot, under-the-skin pink that never really faded. His sandy hair was cropped brutally short across his skull, and he glared at Conri.
“What business is it of yours?” he snapped as he tried to slap Conri’s hands out of the air. “Who the hell are you anyhow?”
“Call me an interested party,” Conri said. He waited for Ned to grab at him again and caught him by the thumb. A hard twist squeezed a surprised howl out of Ned and put him on his knees. “If you want to find your sister, there’s better ways to go—”
It didn’t hurt at first. It never did. Conri felt the impact—a blunt smack to the back of the head that vibrated down to his knees—and smelled his own skin singe against hot metal. He tried to make use of that second between realization and pain, but it didn’t last long. All he had time for, as the smell of whiskey and blood rose on the air, was to realize he’d made a mistake as his legs went from under him.
“I didn’t need your help,” Jamie yelled. “I didn’t ask for it, and I didn’t ask your goddamn kids to come to my party. Why don’t you fuck back off to where you came from.”
Blood dripped down Conri’s face and splattered over the dirt. He ducked his head and wrapped his arms around it just in time. The heavy metal length of the shotgun smacked against the thick meat of his forearms.
Some people you knew they’d kick you—or pistol whip you—when you were down.
Conri absorbed the blows as he waited for the dizziness to fade. When Jamie swung again, Conri grabbed the shotgun before it could connect. He yanked, Jamie held on, and Conri rammed his shoulder into the boy’s soft gut and put him in the dirt.
He grabbed Jamie’s shirt and yanked him up long enough to punch him. His knuckles caught Jamie in the jaw, hard enough to clack his teeth together and throw him back down into the dirt. He wasn’t unconscious, but Conri figured Jamie hadn’t taken a lot of beatings in his life. Winded and with a bitten tongue—Conri assumed from the blood that spluttered from Jamie’s lips—the shock would keep him down for a while.
Ned, though, had already scrambled up. Red dirt stained his knees and his face was hot under his all-weather tan. He lunged forward, and Conri rolled away from Jamie and onto his feet.
His mistake. Ned hadn’t been going for Conri. He’d been after the shotgun, which Jamie had dropped when Conri laid him out. Ned snatched it away from Conri and backed away, sweat on his face and hands clumsy as he fumbled with the weapon.
“Where’s my sister?!” he yelled as he jabbed the gun at Conri. “What did you do to her, you filthy—”
“Nothing,” Conri said as he slowly backed away over the grass. “I came to talk to Jamie. Nobody needs to get hurt here… as long as you put that down.”
Ned’s face twisted, and he flexed his hands about the gun, knuckles white under his skin. “You…. We know the stories, you know. This isn’t some big city, maybe, but that doesn’t mean that we’re stupid. I told Nora to stay away. I told her, but she wouldn’t listen. We know about the deals, the secrets, the orgies in Iron Door, and the girls that never get seen again. Maybe people in LA will keep their mouths shut about it, but not in Elwood. Not with my sister.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Conri saw a flicker of movement on the dirt road down from the house, but he couldn’t spare the attention to identify it. With his luck, the dog had gotten loose and wanted to revisit what a bad dog he was.
“Look, I don’t have anything to do with that,” Conri said. “And if I’ve got a hole in me, I can’t help find your sister, can I?”
It was the wrong thing to say. Ned’s lips skinned back from his teeth in grim satisfaction. Conri relaxed as the cold acceptance that something awful was about to happen seeped through him.
“So you do know where she is?” Ned said triumphantly. “I knew it. I knew you’d taken her. If you don’t tell me right now, I’m gonna—”
He lifted the gun to his shoulder without bothering to finish the sentence. Then he froze and sweat popped on his forehead in a greasy film.
“Mr. Kessell,” Special Agent Bellamy said coldly as he put his hand on Ned’s shoulder. “Put the gun down. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
His dark hair was nearly black at the roots where the sun hadn’t picked out the dark red streaks, and it framed a lean, hard face. For an inappropriate, giddy moment, Conri wondered what it would take to bring a smile to that stern mouth. None of the ideas seemed wise, but buoyed on a flush of relief, they did look tempting.
Of course, he’d always had a thing for dangerous men—it had gotten him into plenty of trouble over the years. But there was a difference between having his head turned by a smart-mouthed thief and making eyes at an Iron Door agent. One was a bad idea, and the other was the last bad idea you got to have.
Ned’s chest heaved under his shabby T-shirt as he stared at Conri, the temptation to finish what he started bald on his face. He’d wanted to do it for a while, Conri figured, in a faceless sort of way. His sister had given him an excuse.
Self-preservation won out. Ned held the shotgun out to the side and let Bell take it off him.
“Yours?” Bell asked as he took it.
Ned glared at the barn, jaw set so hard his teeth must have hurt. So Conri answered for him.
“It’s Jamie’s,” he said. Bell glanced at him, and Conri pointed with his chin to the kid on the ground. “He was going to shoot Ned here for trespassing.”
Bell made a disgusted face and shook his head. He stepped back, and Conri caught a quick glimpse of the gun that had been pressed against Ned’s kidneys before Bell holstered it under his arm.
“Idiots,” Bell said. He broke open the shotgun and unloaded the shell. “You think this is going to find your sister?”
Ned turned around and pointedly spat on the ground in front of Bell. “I think you ain’t even looking,” he said. “Iron Door is compromised. The iron wall is rusted. My sister is a small price to pay for—”
“I know the spiel,” Bell interrupted. “I’ve heard it before. Go home, Mr. Kessel.”
Ned bristled. “You aren’t going to keep me quiet,” he said. “I ain’t alone, Agent. Word is already out.”
Bell’s face hardened.
“Go home,” he repeated. “Or I’ll put you in jail and you can see what good you are to your sister there.”
“Iron Door doesn’t have any jurisdiction over god-fearing human citizens—”
“Not actually true,” Bell said. The shotgun clicked as he closed it again and cocked it back over his shoulder. “But you can argue that to the judge when you make it onto the docket. If you want.”
It took a second, but finally Ned folded.
“This isn’t over,” he muttered darkly as he stalked back to his truck and scrambled up into it. The engine coughed to life, and he reversed jerkily until he could turn the truck around on the churned-up ground. He stuck his arm out through the window and pointed at Jamie, who’d sat up shakily. “If you had anything to do with this, Treva, you’re going to regret it. Your elf knights won’t be around to protect you forever.”
He hit the gas and peeled away in a spray of dirt and stones.
Jamie wiped blood off his mouth. “I didn’ ask for yer help,” he slurred bitterly. “Y’just made it worse.”
CONRI TURNED on the kitchen sink tap and stuck his head under it. Pink blood and red streaks of dirt splattered the polished black surface of the sink before they spiraled down the drain.
“I never saw a changeling before Iron Door rented the old farm for your camp thing,” Jamie said around the cold cola can he had pressed against his mouth. He didn’t sound guilty so much as defensive. “None of us had. And I knew that Ned would make something of it.”
“It’ll heal,” Conri said stoically as he pulled his head out of the stream of water. He ran his hand through his wet hair, the water cold as it trickled down his neck, and winced as his fingers found the split goose-egg knot on the back. Maybe he’d grow in a new white streak once it healed. He turned around to look at the kitchen table, which Jamie currently shared with Agent Bell. “So you’ve never seen a changeling before? How did you manage to offend Robin Mell and his friends enough they drove all the way out here to ruin your party?”
“Who told you that?” Jamie bristled. “I don’t like the fey, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to kick off at them. I’m not stupid. You don’t court the fey, not to make them like or hate you. You avoid ’em. I didn’t get into it with them. It was Nora’s boyfriend, Keith.”
Bell leaned forward intently. His T-shirt pulled tight over his shoulders with the motion, showcasing lean, whipcord muscle layered over his bones. Conri had seen Bell move in the Otherworld—fast enough and mean enough to take on a pack of hounds—so he knew the man wasn’t as slightly built as he looked when he was at ease. It was still worth a second look.
“Her brother didn’t mention that,” Bell said, apparently uninterested in Conri’s brief distraction. “According to him she wasn’t seeing anyone.”
“Well she isn’t going to tell him,” Jamie said with ripe, teenage contempt. He rolled the can up over his jaw, where a blue bruise spread under patchy stubble. “You’ve met him. Would you tell him anything? He’s a psycho. Always has been, even before their parents died. Nora is okay, but…. Ned’s a nutjob. And there’s the whole thing with the money.”
“Money?”
“They don’t have any,” Jamie said with a mixture of pity and satisfaction. His family obviously did. “Or not enough. That’s what I heard at school, anyhow. Ned’s always been good with pigs, but not much else.”
Conri leaned back against the counter. His hair dripped cold water down his back. A wiser man would have taken the hint.
“So, what happened with her boyfriend?” he asked. “Was he jealous that Robin turned Nora’s head?”
Ned snorted. “Are you kidding? Have you seen Nora? I mean, she’s okay, but she’s hardly the sort of girl a fey chases after. She’s just… Nora. Anyhow, I had nothing to do with it, okay? I only know what happened because someone told me after the points showed up—”
He broke off as he glanced at Conri, who was more “pointed” than most of the fey, and flushed dully. Bell rapped his knuckles on the table to get Jamie’s attention back on him.
“You can’t save that,” he said. “So move on.”
Conri grinned. He didn’t have fangs—a dentist would have been hard-pressed to find anything wrong in his mouth—but his teeth gave the impression of sharp. Jamie swallowed hard, the bob of his Adam’s apple audible, and looked away. He pressed the can hard against his cheek and tried again.
“Yeah, well, it was nothing big. The… the fey kids had come down into town from camp, and Keith, y’know, helped them out. With a lift to….”
“To?” Bell said.
Jamie shrugged and looked down at the table. The tops of his ears were dull, resentful pink as he muttered something under his breath. Conri heard him anyhow.
“The shit train?” he said. “What’s what?”
“There’s a landfill about twenty miles north,” he said. “Waste on the way there by rail stops here overnight sometimes. Sometimes longer. It smells like… shit.”
“It was a joke,” Jamie said, the o drawn out in exasperation. “Like, none of us want them in town. It’s not normal. But he left them there to make a point. He didn’t do anything to them.”
Conri grimaced and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. In his day, admittedly a looooong time ago, people knew the only fragile thing about a fey was their ego. Even a wound from iron healed quicker and cleaner than a blow to their pride.
“It was a joke!” Jamie repeated indignantly as he looked between Conri and Bell in a futile search for a sympathetic face. “They didn’t have to come here to ruin my party over it.”
Bell raised his eyebrows. “And kidnap your friend,” he reminded him.
“Yeah. I mean, of course,” Jamie said. He squirmed in his seat, the legs loud as they scraped on the black-tiled floor, and then frowned. His voice was slow as he said, “Thing is, none of us realized they were here at first? I mean, we did but none of us realized that they obviously shouldn’t be there? It was like they used magic on us, and that’s not allowed, right? So, I mean, nothing after that was our fault.”
There was probably some sort of rule that said Bell couldn’t lie to the people he was meant to work for. Conri wasn’t under any such obligation. The bitter taste in the back of his throat at the idea of this soft, spoiled brat telling Finn he didn’t belong? That made the lie slip out smoother.
“That’s the law,” he said earnestly. “Whatever you did, Iron Door can’t do anything about it now. Goddammit.”
Bell gave him a dry look over the table but let it stand as Jamie exhaled in relief.
“I figured,” he said. “But it’s good to know. I missed what started it, but Keith and one of the kids from the camp, the blond one, had gotten into it over something. That’s when we all realized that they shouldn’t be there, and it got a bit….”
Conri remembered the broken boards in the barn walls and the smashed bottles in a new light.
“Violent,” he said.
“Not our fault, though,” Jamie said quickly. “They used magic on us, right? We weren’t in our right minds. And we were drunk. No one got hurt, not really hurt, that I saw. The fey gave as good as they got. Then they got the point and left. My mom is going to kill me when she sees what they did to the barn, and they were laughing as they drove off.”
“Not all of them,” Bell said. He pulled his phone out and slid it over the table in front of Jamie. “Robin. Thistle. Shanko….”
He flicked through the photos of the missing kids. Conri craned his neck to watch the images, upside down, as they skimmed over the screen. He didn’t know any of them. That wasn’t a surprise. Even if the families were from LA, Conri didn’t hang out with other changelings much. Shanko was a changeling—almost human for now, with acne and dark circles under his eyes—while the others were foundlings a few years down the “not looking like a goblin” from Finn.
Except for Thistle, who seemed to have stuck.
“You might not like them,” Bell said. “But they have parents, families who’ll miss them. What happened after the others left? What happened to Nora? You already told us you didn’t know, so now tell us what you do remember. Did she leave with them?”
“No. Maybe,” Jamie stumbled over his words. “I wanted everyone to leave, okay? I didn’t care where they went. But… Keith went after them. With iron.”
“KEITH RAWLINS,” Bell said into the phone as he walked down the steps off the Treva’s porch. Back at the camp, he heard his colleague mutter the name under her breath as she wrote it down. Technically Agent Jayne outranked him, but seniority didn’t matter when the case involved the Otherworld. She couldn’t cross, so Bell took point on the investigation. “Find out if he made it home last night.”
“You think they took him too?” she asked, a sour note in her voice. Jayne didn’t like anything that came across the border, not even changelings. It didn’t impact her work—and she was a hero like Felix, so it didn’t matter if it did—but she enjoyed it when they screwed up. “That won’t be something that the government can massage out of existence.”
“Find out if he’s sleeping off some hard cider at home first,” Bell told her. “Then we’ll know if we need to worry about him or not.”
Behind them, the dog, which had been sacked out in the shade at the side of the house, exploded into a frenzy of snarled barks. The chain it was hooked to rattled noisily as it was yanked tight.
“Hounds?” Jayne asked with a flicker of concern in her voice.
Bell turned around and saw Conri at the bottom of the steps. Slabber dripped from the dog’s jowls as it snapped the air in front of his worn T-shirt. He stared it down for a second until the dog gave up, snapped the air one last time, and flopped down on its stomach in the dirt.
“Just dogs,” he said dryly. “Don’t worry about it. Text me when you know anything. I’ll get back when I can.”
“Safe travels,” she wished him.
The line went dead, and Bell tucked the phone into his jacket and watched as the dog, a low, angry growl rattling between her chest and the dirt, glared up at Conri with doleful, resentful eyes. Bell was surprised. He would have expected dogs would like the man, considering…. He glanced at Conri’s mottled hair and mismatched dog eyes and supposed a lot of people made that assumption.
He didn’t ask. Conri’s relationship with dogs wasn’t his business, unlike his relationship to this case.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Same thing as you,” Conri said. He left the dog to growl and walked over to Bell. “Trying to find out what happened to Nora and the other kids.”
“That’s my job.”
Conri shrugged and grinned. It was a warm, easy smile that creased his face around it and made him look—despite everything—very human. And smug.
“Mine too,” he said as he handed over his wallet. Bell flicked it open and frowned at the skip tracer license tucked in next to his driver’s license. “I guess this is where we team up, huh?”
“You watch a lot of TV, huh?” Bell said. He tossed the wallet back, and Conri caught it out of the air. “That’s not how the real world works. You’re the father of a person of interest in this case—in fact, with everything riding on this, you probably are a person of interest—and you’re going to stay out of my way.”
“Or?” he asked with a hint of a smile.
Bell sighed. Changelings could be frustrating. Whatever physical changes their stay in the Otherworld had made on them were nothing to the ones under the skin. Even people who’d returned, more or less, to the world they left, didn’t always remember the right ways to react.
Or care about them, which Bell suspected was more Conri’s problem. He was out of luck that Bell wasn’t fey and didn’t need someone to play the fool.
“This isn’t a negotiation. I don’t need to threaten you, Conri. I’ve told you what’s going to happen, and now you’re going to do it. Next time I won’t be there to stop you getting shot. Understood?”
There was a pause, and then Conri nodded and glanced away from Bell and across the farm. It should have been satisfying, but Bell felt a brief, selfish twitch of regret. He might not need a partner, but he wouldn’t have objected to at least a token protest. It would have given him something to daydream about later.
Not—he gave himself a mental slap on the back of the head—that he was going to have time for that anyhow. He had a job to do, and he’d always been better at that than relationships anyhow. Between what he did and what he was? One or the other of those had wrecked all of his relationships—not just romantic—over the years. Most people found it hard enough to know someone they cared about might be put in harm’s way every day, never mind that harm would be on the other side of a border they’d never cross and he might never cross back. Would, one day, never cross back over.
Walkers didn’t die, they disappeared. Everyone understood that was pretty much the same thing.
Conri shouldn’t be on Bell’s radar to be anything other than a distraction. He might want someone to be… something… but not today. Not Conri. That was too complicated even for someone who wasn’t anything but a fun night on a motel mattress.
“Stay out of Kessel’s way,” Bell told him. “Once I find out what happened, things will settle down.”
Conri scratched his cheek under his water-blue eye. He looked, for a moment, bone-tired under the easygoing charm. “That depends on what happened, doesn’t it?”
He wasn’t wrong. Bell grimaced to himself. Most of the time, he didn’t have to deal with the aftercare side of the job. He’d always assumed that was how the responsibilities were divided—he crossed into the Otherworld and fought monsters, and agents like Jayne held hands and soothed fevered brows—but maybe he was bad at it.
“Go back to town, stay out of trouble,” he repeated the order and turned away.
He headed back toward the Iron Door–issued black SUV parked behind Conri’s Toyota. His mind was already occupied with a plan of attack for the search—grid patterns and bleak calculations of how much ground one man could cover—so he got halfway before he felt the prickle on the back of his neck. He looked around and into Conri’s face, right by his shoulder.
“What the fuck?” he blurted in surprise. No one got that close to him without him being aware of it. Humans didn’t, never mind a changeling who wore the Otherworld like a tattoo. He’d spent too long alone on the far side of the border, where if you dropped your guard even once, something would feel obliged to take advantage of it. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I said I understood,” Conri pointed out. “Not that I agreed.”
He detoured around Bell and headed for the passenger side of the car. The back of his T-shirt was damp, plastered to the thick muscles of his back, and blood splattered a dingy pattern against the faded gray fabric.
“I don’t need help,” Bell said roughly, caught on an uncomfortable fork of reluctant attraction and equally unwelcome concern. His job was to get Nora back, not worry over some cheerful idiot who was probably more resilient than Bell.
Conri stood on the frame of the car, one arm hooked over the door he’d already opened. The wind ruffled his shaggy cropped hair and made him squint one eye shut. It should have made him look more human, blurred the edges of the changes the fey had wrought, but somehow it didn’t. Some things were more than skin deep.
“Liar.”
“I was grateful for your help earlier,” Bell said. “Don’t push it and don’t forget I can still charge you for illegally going to the Otherworld. You have the same choice as Treva—stay out of my way or wait this out in a cell.”
“Okay, I guess it’s the cell.” Conri dropped down into the passenger seat and made himself comfortable. He waited for Bell to yank the driver’s side door open and grinned at him as he slotted the seat belt in place. “So, what’s it going to be, Agent? You can spend some of Nora’s precious minutes taking me all the way back to town to find a cell I can’t get out of. Or you can accept my help.”
Bell braced his arms against the roof of the car and scowled at Conri.
“I could drag you out of the car and leave you cuffed to the fence.”
Something moved murkily under Conri’s charm, a hint of something dark that cut the sunshine and easy smiles. It should have made Bell pull back, warned him off. Instead it made his tongue curl for more—like a shot of whiskey in hot chocolate.
“Either we work together or we work at odds,” Conri said flatly. He leaned back in the seat and crossed his arms. “I’m not going to sit this out, and where are you going to find someone else in Elwood who can cross into the Otherworld, illegally or not?”
He wasn’t, and Iron Door wasn’t going to get someone to Elwood in time to be of any use.
“What’s the price?” he asked.
Most changelings couldn’t cross on their own—the Otherworld wouldn’t be much of a trap if you could wander home—but those who could paid a price in blood or time or some esoteric item that the fey who’d given them the gift counted their debts in. Bell wasn’t going to run Conri as an asset, even an aggressively willing one, if it would kill or maim him.
Conri looked away from him. “There isn’t one,” he said. “It’s none of your business why.”
“There’s always a price,” Bell said. “Have you already paid it?”
“Twice.”
A bitter note to Conri’s voice sold that claim. Most Walkers were cocky and arrogant. The ones who joined Iron Door were dangerous to know—in a lot of ways—and the ones who hadn’t were out for themselves. The one thing they all had in common was that, when they talked about how they’d gotten their gift? None of them sounded sure they’d come out ahead.
Bell thought about it and then swore under his breath. The odds weren’t much better with two people on the hunt, but they were better. With the entire, tenuous peace with the fey on his shoulders, Bell would take any advantage he could get.
Even one he maybe couldn’t trust.
“Okay, you’re so useful,” he said. “Prove it. There’s only one ford into the Otherworld here. How the hell did a couple of kids get from here to where we met? It’s a good eight miles and it’s the only ford in and out of the slough. Can you tell me that?”
Conri shed his brief, dour mood like a too-heavy coat as he unleashed a wide, crooked smile.
“I can do better than that,” he said. “I can show you.”
Bell had already given in. He climbed into the car, slammed the door, and started the engine. Then he bumped the car over the ruts and turned out onto the road.
“Probably,” Conri hedged as he braced one black-sneakered foot against the dash and slouched down. “You’ll see.”
“IT’S A tree,” Bell said as he leaned his hips against the side of the SUV and crossed his arms. His head throbbed with frustration and pressure. There wasn’t exactly a Golden Hour where you could be sure you’d get back who, and what, had crossed over into the Otherworld, but sunrise or sunset was when you had a chance. He should be looking for Nora, and Keith now, since his parents had confirmed the other teenager hadn’t made his way home last night, not following Conri’s vague directions along backroads.
Conri put his hand on the tree, fingers spread, and then pulled it back. He showed Bell his palm, the skin welted with itchy-looking red hives.
“It’s a lock,” he said.
Surprise pulled Bell up off the car and forward. He took Conri’s hand to check the marks, a prickle of interest sharp and ignored in the back of his throat as he rubbed his thumb over the broad, callused palm. No corresponding tingle on his skin, so he turned to the tree. It took him a minute to find the first one, the head half-buried under scabs of overgrown bark. Once he did, though, the others were easier.
Four old iron nails driven deep into the bark of the tree and left to rust. Bell pulled a knife and dug the bark away from one until he could get a better look at it. Under the rough plaque of rust and dirt, it looked homemade, roughly forged and clumsy. He picked at it with his nails, but there was no give. The wood around the nails was stained red and gray, as if it had bled.
“The tree at Treva’s house,” he said as he stepped back and wiped his hands. “That chain was older than the dog was.”
Conri nodded. “Older than the house probably,” he said. “We—me and Finn—passed a rock on the way into town that was covered in horseshoes. I thought it was just another unfriendly town. It’s been a… while… since I saw anyone try anything like this.”
“They closed off the Otherworld,” Bell said. The idea felt… strange. It would close every single case that Iron Door had on the books—past, present, and future—but the idea didn’t have the appeal it should. The Otherworld was his enemy, but it had been his enemy his whole life. He couldn’t imagine it gone. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“It isn’t,” Conri said. “Usually. Anywhere but a slough and the movement of the Otherworld would have either burst the locks or worn itself a new route. Even here, there’s one ford left. They probably tried to lock that off too, but it would only have lasted until the first solstice. Then it would burst like a cyst. That would have been a bad year for Elwood.”
Bell walked around the tree. There were four nails on the other side too, lower down and hammered in hard enough to flatten the heads. He ran his thumb over the rough metal and closed his eyes.
It was hard to explain what it felt like to cross into the Otherworld. Bell had tried over the years, but he’d eventually given up. People always thought he kept something back, some trick or gadget that would explain how it worked. He hadn’t. The border… felt like a threshold, that feeling you had when you were about to knock on a door you knew would be answered.
This felt like the opposite. The broody emptiness of a house you knew was abandoned and the tight expectation of a knock that echoed. It made his chest tighten and the back of his neck itch.
“Interesting,” he said as he opened his eyes. Conri had gotten too close again, his shoulder propped against the tree next to Bell’s hand and his long body hipshot and angled. Bell resisted the temptation to be charmed and stepped back. “How does it help us? If the ford is locked—”
“An old lock,” Conri said. He slapped the tree. “On old doors. Push it hard enough from either side and it would crack open. Not far, not yet, but enough for a few kids to squeeze through. Especially if their blood was up and emotions running high from the scene at the barn. That would have rattled the slough back to life. For a while.”
Bell swore under his breath and walked around the tree to run his eye along the skyline. They’d taken the long way around, on rutted country roads with crumbled edges and faded paint, but as the crow flies…. There it was. Bell could see the peaked roof of the Treva barn from here. It would take him ten minutes to reach it if he cut through the fields, probably less for a scared teenage girl who ran track and had enough cider that she wasn’t feeling any pain.
“How did they find it?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Local legends,” Conri said. “Kids around here probably dare one another to go to the boarded-up doors of the haunted house they made the Otherworld into. Knock, run away, and tell everyone you saw the fey. The kids from camp… you ever get into so much trouble that you run and only realize where you’re going when you hit your own front door?”
… his arm throbbed, a hot, sickly pulse of pain that kept time with the slap of his wet sneakers on the road. There was blood—not all of it his, but some of it—and he could taste his own panic with each breath he took. Fear of what was behind him, fear of what would happen if anyone found out, and a rattling cant of every bad thing anyone had ever said between his ears.
It had been Felix he’d run to, though, not his own family.
“Sort of,” Bell said, the words dry on the back of his throat.
“For Robin and the other fey, this is home,” Conri touched the tree with his fingertips and looked wistful. “And it wants them back. But we’re not so lucky. If we want to cross over, we have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
He started toward the car, loose-limbed and confident. Bell stepped in front of him, fingers steepled against Conri’s chest to stop him in place. The T-shirt was thin, and Bell could feel the warm skin and heavy muscle under it.
“How did you find it?”
Conri raised his eyebrows and then shrugged the insult off. “It’s downhill,” he said. “When people panic, they run downhill, because it feels like the smartest decision, even if it isn’t. And unless there’s water to distract them, they run toward the moon. It feels safer if you can see. So they came in this direction, and I hoped my theory was right. You can feel the ford now, can’t you? If you’d known what to look for, you could have found it too, right?”
Maybe. Now that Bell had touched the ford, he could sort of sense it on the edge of his mind, the unfriendly “no” of something that you weren’t expected to open. It felt like the connecting door in a hotel room. The one you rattled tentatively anyhow, just to see.
“Could you open the ford again? he asked.
Conri thought about it. “After this long? I doubt it,” he said. “Even if you found all the nails and pulled them out, the iron has leached into the wood. The ford would have to be hacked back open to clear it.”
“Let’s see,” Bell said.
He pulled his hand away from Conri’s chest and loped around to the back of the car. He opened the trunk and used his thumb to unlock the heavy black box that took up most of the space. The inside was laid out with obsessive order—guns clipped to the back and ammunition directly below them, knives sheathed in custom-made nanoplastic sheathes to protect the edges, and fairy ointment sealed in lead to keep it potent. Bell lifted the knives and reached under to grab the heavy iron chains. They were meant as restraints, but they’d do.
The links rattled as he hauled them out of the trunk and against the back of the SUV. A few chips dinged the glossy black paintwork.
When Conri saw the iron looped around Bell’s wrist, he took a quick, long step back. His easy, loose-boned body language tightened, and he shifted his weight onto his toes.
“What—”
“It’s not for you,” Bell said. “I never asked to be a Walker, but I am. No one gets to close the door on me.”
He draped the weight of the chain over his shoulder and crossed the scrubby grass back to the iron-studded tree. Conri lingered out of reach, obviously not entirely convinced. The trunk wasn’t that thick compared to those around it. Nails and stagnant magic weren’t good for growing things, apparently. Who knew? He looped the chains around the base of the tree twice and then dragged the heavy length that was left back to the car. It rattled and jingled as it untangled.
“That’s… if you cut it open, it won’t be like a normal ford,” Conri warned. He slunk closer, skittish on his feet as the chains rattled near them. “The slough has probably congealed around it. This will be like lancing a boil and then jumping in.”
Bell paused with the chains only half clipped to the tow bar and gave Conri a wry look. “Thanks for the imagery. Get in the car.”
Conri didn’t do as he was told….
“You can’t help with this. It’s pure, once-worked iron,” Bell said. “So get in, and when I tell you to hit the gas, you hit the gas.”
Conri looked like he was going to argue but instead did as he was told and scrambled into the cab. He left the door cracked open as he started the engine and Bell locked the chains in place. His fingers were bruised and his knuckles were bleeding from being pinched between the links by the time he finished.
“Now,” he yelled over the engine.
There was a long pause, although he was pretty sure Conri’s pointy ears had caught the order, and then a muttered fuck before the engine revved and the SUV lurched forward. The chains yanked tight, tore the bark off the tree in strips and splinters, and jolted the SUV to a tire-spinning stop. Dirt and grass spewed out the back as the rear fishtailed and white, acrid smoke spewed out around them.
For a second it looked like the tree was going to win, and then Conri slammed the gas down to the floor. The engine made a raw metal groan as it inched forward, and then the tree tore out of the ground in a shower of dirt and stones and thick, tangled roots. It whiplashed through the air like a mace as the SUV shot forward.
Bell swore and threw himself backward. He hit the ground with a thump, and the branches scraped his hands and face as it was dragged over him. It felt like being beaten, but quickly. Then it was gone.
He rolled over, wiped blood out of his eyes, and shoved himself to his feet. His ribs ached, and a raw scrape ran from the middle of his forearm down to his knuckles. By Iron Door standards, he was whole enough.
Conri spun the wheel and hit the brakes before he drove off the other side of the road. The tree bounced twice and then smashed into the side of the car with a crack that tore metal and scattered chunks of broken glass over the tarmac.
“Fuck,” Bell muttered. All that soul-searching about whether it was appropriate to work with Conri—a changeling whose kid might still be involved somehow and who was too hot for Bell’s own good—and he got the man killed. He picked a splinter out of the back of his hand and loped over to the mangled SUV.
The tree was stuck to the side of the car like a burr, branches jammed through the metal and shoved through the smashed windows. Conri slouched in the driver’s seat, his skin paler than usual and his eyes closed. He had, Bell noticed, ridiculously pretty lashes.
“Conri?” He grabbed at the branches and wrenched them back until they broke, and he could scrape them out of the window. Something hot scraped his fingers, and he flinched back. It was one of the nails, hot enough to singe Bell’s fingertips from the energy that had torn through it. It had left a long mark on Conri’s face, half blister and half cut. Bell grabbed it, ignored the sting in his thumb and forefinger, and wrenched it loose. “Are you okay? Con?”
One eye opened cautiously, bright blue squinted through the thick lashes. After a second, the other followed suit.
“Fuck,” he said with feeling. “That was close.
Bell would have very much liked to kiss him. The urge caught him by surprise with the sudden intensity of it. He could actually feel it—the firm pressure of Conri’s lips and the taste of him on Bell’s tongue. It stung like sour candy as he swallowed the ache and made himself focus.
“It worked,” he said. He could feel the ford again, the slightly uncomfortable welcome of a wide-open door and no one else around. “We can follow them.”