“Don’t be afraid, daughter.
Fod mewn heddwch
.” She touched my forehead and, almost instantly, my muscles relaxed and a calm, pure energy flowed through me. She continued to whisper in a language I didn’t understand, until her final words: “Such pain.”
A crash from below destroyed the moment—glass shattering, followed by hoarse bellows. “The Axeman cometh,” I muttered, my feel-good elven vibes rapidly fading.
“Let’s get inside.” Rand propelled me forward, and we followed Vervain back into the room. Rand closed the door and locked it. I was glad to see a deadbolt instead of a flimsy doorknob lock. I barely had time to register a large, softly lit room decorated in earth tones before another crash came from downstairs.
“He’s in the greenhouse,” Vervain said. “Why would he hurt the plants?”
Was she bonkers? The man was an immortal undead serial killer fueled by the cold magic of a necromancer. He wasn’t going to pet the azaleas and sing Grateful Dead songs.
Rand rested hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him.
“Are you hurt?”
I blinked at him. “My house is burning and my cat is in there.” Sebastian and I had a rocky relationship, but I loved him. He was my last living link to Gerry.
Rand stepped back and looked at my legs, shrouded in strands of blood-soaked pantyhose. My feet left bloody prints wherever I’d stepped.
I rubbed my eyes. “I’m okay.”
He seemed satisfied that was true, and lifted my chin to look up at him. “Focus on what I’m saying. There’s an open transport in the bathroom, right behind us. If we get separated, go through it. We’ll follow if we can. Do you understand?”
I nodded and looked back at the glowing Vervain, whose attention was riveted on the door into the hallway. Rand handed the broken staff to me before moving to the far wall. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t lost Charlie in the chaos. He gripped a large chest of drawers around its top surface and dragged it in front of the door. Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairway, and my heart seemed to pound in time with their cadence.
“We should all go now,” I said. “Why wait?”
“It goes straight into Elfheim, and we’re giving Mace time to cool down. If we can stop the Axeman here it’ll be better.” Rand’s words tumbled out in a rush, and he flinched when the door into the room next to us crashed. “The transport word is
pobl-o-dân
. Say it.”
I didn’t trust Rand. I didn’t trust Vervain. I sure as hell didn’t want to run to Elf heim. But I didn’t have any other options. “Poblo- don,” I repeated, chanting it in my head. Whatever the hell it meant. “Poblo-don. Poblo-don.”
The bedroom door shook in its frame, followed by a roar of rage that didn’t sound even vaguely human. In an upper door panel not covered by the chest, the edge of a blade broke through once, then again.
You’d think when he burned down my house he’d at least have lost his freaking ax, but no.
Rand came to stand at my right, grasping my hand. “Vervain’s magic is strongest. She wants to face him first.”
The absurdity of this situation struck me, and I could hear Alex’s voice in the back of my head, ranting, “Not a goddamn one of you idiots has a weapon except for a broken staff.” I wished I had taken his advice to buy a gun. Instead, here Rand and I stood like unarmed fools, holding hands and hiding behind a glowing elven clan chief with a death wish.
The top part of the door caved in with a crash, and the Axeman stuck his head in the opening like a half-burned, demented Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
— except crazier.
With one great shove, he broke through the rest of the door, topping the heavy dresser on its side and backing us all toward the bathroom. A woman’s scream pierced the air, and in the chaos, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t me.
I pulled on Rand’s arm. “Transport— now!” I’d rather face Mace Banyan and his whistling cane than let the Axeman grab me again. Obviously, my wards and fire from the broken staff hadn’t been enough to slow him down. I had no idea what kind of magic elves possessed beyond mental assault, but the Axeman didn’t have enough of his own mind left to care about selfpreservation.
Rand gave me a hard shove into the bathroom and slammed the door, leaving me alone inside, holding the side of the pedestal sink. The staff had rolled across the tile and come to a stop near the tub. I grabbed it and then tugged on the doorknob but it wouldn’t turn. Rand had to be holding it from the other side.
Poblo-don, Poblo-don.
I glancing around, looking for a window, but there wasn’t one. White tile, white tub and toilet, white towels. The man needed some serious color advice. But on the floor, in what looked like copper inlaid into the ceramic tile, was an interlocking circle and triangle. A quick touch to the transport symbol shot enough magical zing into my hand to tell me it was live. What wizard had Rand gotten to set up his own personal transport to Elf heim?
Another crash burst from the bedroom, and I heard Rand shouting in that strange, strangled-sounding language of theirs. As tempting as it was for me to jump in the transport and take off, I couldn’t do it. Rand and Vervain were only facing the Axeman because of me and I wouldn’t run away while they stood and fought.
I returned to the door and turned the knob. This time the door opened, and I stared into the room, my overwhelmed brain trying to make sense of the horror. Blood covered everything.
Rand was locked in hand-to- hand combat with the Axeman, except they weren’t exactly fighting. Rand was on his back on the floor, chanting his words, glowing like Vervain had been earlier, his hands locked around the killer’s black-charred neck. The Axeman leaned over him, his face covered with blackened skin, blood, and dangling chunks of flesh. He screeched as if whatever Rand was doing hurt, but he wasn’t letting go. Holy crap.
I scanned the room for Vervain, and the room spun when I saw her. I slipped out of the bathroom and ran to where she lay, but she was beyond help. Her head lay at an unnatural angle, neck obviously broken. Chunks of her body were missing.
Suddenly, everything stopped. Only the raspy breaths of the Axeman broke the silence, and I looked around at him. Rand lay at his feet, unmoving, covered in so much blood I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. In the silence, I finally saw his chest rise and fall in a series of sporadic, shallow breaths.
I swallowed hard and held the pieces of the staff in front of me. I wasn’t sure how much juice I had left, but everything I could muster would be going into that cracked piece of wood.
My feet skidded in the blood, but I skated toward the Axeman and thrust the staff against his chest, shooting all my magical energy into him. He screamed, a rasping, inhuman shriek that seemed to freeze me in place—until his arm hit my neck in a perfect clothesline, batting me across the room.
I landed facedown, my body skating across the bloodcovered hardwood before hitting the footboard of the bed hard enough in the midsection to knock the air out of my lungs.
But for the moment, and I knew it would be a short one, the Axeman was down. He sat against the upturned chest of drawers, keening and rocking as he swatted at the flames engulfing his pants. I scrambled to Rand, grabbed two handfuls of bloody sweater, and, walking backward, dragged him into the bathroom.
Leveraging his long legs around the doorway, I managed to shove the door closed and roll him into the transport. There wasn’t room for me to stand next to him and still be inside the symbols, so I made sure his hands and legs were in, then sat on him.
“Poblo . . . crap! Poblo-don. Poblo-don!” I screamed the words, looking up as the bathroom door crashed in, the Axeman falling with the force of his thrust amid the splintered pieces of wood.
The last thing I heard was the enraged sound of a killer whose prey had escaped.
R
and and I landed in the same cabin where the Synod had put me through their warped version of
This Is Your Life
. The open living area was lit only by a single, soft lamp on one of the end tables, and no flames flickered in the fireplace. We weren’t expected, which was a good thing.
I rolled off Rand and lay on the floor next to him, trying to remember how to breathe and to summon the strength to assess our injuries. After I rested my eyes for a moment . . .
“Dru—wake up.” Rand lay on his side, facing me, and cradled my cheek with a bloody hand. His breath rasped in and out like the bellows of an accordion, or like he’d run a marathon.
“Rand.” My voice sounded like that of a sixty-year- old chain-smoker. “You look like hell.” How long had I slept?
“We’ve got to leave. Mace will already be on his way. This transport is monitored so he’ll know it’s been used.”
I groaned, and after two failed attempts managed to sit up. Everything hurt. Rand really did look awful. The lower front of his sweater, once a pale blue, was covered in such gore I couldn’t tell what was flesh and what was wool. “How badly are you hurt?”
He shook his head, struggling to force out his words. “I don’t know. But we have to get out of Elf heim.”
Good Lord, they’d already whipped and beaten him black and blue, and with Vervain’s death he had assumed her rank on the Synod. Not that I thought he’d taken time to consider that yet. “Let’s just stay and deal with Mace. Why should we run?” We were in no shape to run.
He closed his eyes. “Because they might be involved in this. They might be behind it. I don’t have proof, but my senses tell me it’s true. It might not be Mace himself, but if it’s one of the others he probably knows about it. He is not our ally.”
Rand really thought the elves were behind this?
“Plus, Mace knows we’re bonded. He found out somehow,” Rand panted. “That’s why my mother was in New Orleans. She’d come to warn me away from Elfheim until Mace cooled off.”
I stared at him, my mind spinning through the possibilities. “But elves aren’t necromancers.”
He fought to keep his eyes open. “No, but we hire wizards all the time to do jobs that aren’t legal. How do you think I got two permanent transports set up in my house in New Orleans? And who else sees you as a big-enough threat to want you dead?” He winced and pressed bloody fingers into his bloody stomach. “The wizards want to use your skills, not destroy them. Only the other elven clans, who saw you as a threat even before we were bonded, really want you dead. My money’s on Lily if not Mace himself.”
I thought again of Lily being in the L’Amour Sauvage office with Etienne— a necromancer. Even if he didn’t do it himself, he might have given her a recommendation. Rand was right. No wizards hated me enough to go after me like this alone, but there had to be at least one greedy enough or power-hungry enough to help the elves.
Regardless, Elfheim was the last place I needed to be. “Okay, let’s get out of here. Where can this transport take us? We can’t go back to New Orleans. Not yet.”
Rand winced and shifted position. “The transport here follows the geomantic lines. We can go to Old Orleans or one of its outposts, to Vampyre, to Faerie, or other places in Elf heim.”
Rand tried to get to his feet, but fell back with a grunt.
I managed to get up and held out a hand. With me pulling hard, he finally got upright, if slightly hunched over. He kept his left hand clamped on his stomach as if his organs might spill out if he let go. My own ribcage felt as if a water buffalo had trampled on it after hitting the bedframe, but at least I wasn’t bleeding.
He couldn’t take much more, and we needed to be gone. I located the transport by the heaviest bloodstains and hobbled into it.
Rand came to stand beside me, almost doubled over in pain. “Say
pobl-o-dân
and then the destination. Where are we going?”
I wrapped an arm around his waist and named the only place I could think of where I’d feel halfway safe: “
Pobl-o-dân
. Old Barataria. Grand Terre.”
T
ransports were draining, even if a certain wizard hadn’t already used up all her physical magic trying to fight off a homicidal undead maniac. Rand and I landed on a cold patch of ground in the pitch-black night, the sole illumination from the Beyond’s ever-present full moon.
Its silvery glow revealed only that we’d come to rest on soft, damp soil, with high grasses around us. The crash of waves could be heard nearby, and the air was thick with the smell of salt and seaweed. This was Grand Terre, I assumed, but where on Grand Terre was another matter. Jean Lafitte probably wouldn’t have an open transport too close to his home in the Beyond, just in case unwelcome visitors popped in.
I visualized the Louisiana coastline in my mind and tried to fix our position by the sound of the waves. Grand Terre and Grand Isle were the two biggest barrier islands due south of New Orleans. In modern times, Grand Terre was unpopulated except for a state-protected wildlife area, much of the island lost to erosion. In Jean’s times it had been much larger, its land more solid. He owned a big house here, and ruled a colony of up to a thousand pirates and other assorted riffraff I didn’t want to stumble across.
Rand and I had collapsed where we landed, and didn’t speak for a while. The black sky overhead seemed to hang low because of all the stars. Had there been more stars back in the early nineteenth-century slice of time Old Barataria was caught in? Or had city life just dulled the wonderment of them because we’d surrounded ourselves with so much fake dazzle?
Finally, I climbed to my feet. Sea winds ruffled through the tall grasses and whipped my hair across my face hard enough to sting. I shivered from the cooling air, and realized for the first time that my sexy little red dress was mostly in shreds.
As the adrenaline drained, the damage reports started filtering from body to brain. My feet had been shredded from running without shoes, and the dirt—or sand, or whatever combination of the two we’d landed on—stung them. My head throbbed. Breathing was torture. I touched tentative fingers against my ribcage, and gasped from the knife-jab of pain. At least one of the ribs that had just healed was bruised again, if not cracked. I was a bloody mess but had no idea how much of the blood was mine.