“It’s not drugged. If I was going to drug you, I would just have Alexa press against your jaw and we would pill you like a cat. It’s just coffee.”
I was determined not to enjoy it, purely out of spite, but I might have moaned a little bit with pleasure when it hit my tongue.
“The drugs, however, are
here
,” he said, balancing them on my thigh. “Take them or I will get Alexa to help me pry that pretty mouth of yours open.”
I hurt too much to argue, but I gave him a weak glower while I washed them down with a mouthful of scalding coffee. I swallowed, then said, “One problem with going, Marshall was our subject matter expert, because apparently none of the elfin actually dig up their own shit. Now that we know someone else is looking for whatever perked her brain up, we’re going to have competition,
and
we don’t have a damned clue what we’re looking for.”
“Competition that knows more than we do.” Cari took the cup from my hand, sipped at it, then handed it back. She was oblivious to Ryder’s scowl, or quite possibly she didn’t give a shit. Either way, she licked the drops off of her full mouth with the end of her tongue, then said, “If you’re serious about going out there, I’m coming with you.”
“I’m contracted for one Stalker. Not two.” Ryder jerked his thumb at me. “The one I have is very expensive, and he is going to say no.”
“No, it makes sense. You’ll need more fighting power than just Kai,” Alexa interrupted. “Since you insist on going yourself, I can—”
“Yes, my other option was to send you, and right now, you’re more important to the Court than I am.” He perched on the couch arm by my side, putting his hand on my shoulder when I shifted to give him room. “Stay. You are fine. Cousin, Kaia and Rhianna need you right now. As does your daughter. Southern Rise is building, and its defenses aren’t complete. I can be lost. You cannot.”
“I don’t like it. It is stupid and wasteful,” his cousin snapped back, making another circuit of the rug. “And for what? You don’t know what you are looking for. You don’t even know
where
you need to look.”
“Marshall had an assistant. He’s the one who found the body. The police would not let me talk to him, but I plan to once he’s released. I’m hoping she shared what she knew with him.” He shrugged. “If not, then perhaps someone on the university board.”
“For all we know, her assistant’s the one who killed her”—I hated to point out the obvious, but Ryder tended to go glass half-full even when it was leaking—“and sent those assholes after us.”
“Weren’t very competent,” Cari grumbled. “You’re still alive.”
“Thanks, I’ll be sure to tell them to work harder next time I see them.” I took another sip from my mug, handing it back to Cari when she reached for it. Either Ryder or Newt growled, but I wasn’t sure. “Point is, do we make the run with the assistant and hope he wasn’t the one who screwed us or head up there and just take everything we can find?”
Cari licked a bit of foam from the lip of the mug. “What
exactly
is it you were hoping to find?”
“There is evidence of an old city there,” Ryder explained. He intercepted my coffee mug when Cari passed it back over, reaching across my shoulders to take it from her hands. “From what I saw in the photos Marshall was given, there are rituals engraved into some of the walls—fertility rituals. Perhaps they will help shore up the elfin birth rate.”
“And here I was all rooting for you. Then you threw in that last
perhaps
,” I grumbled. “With our luck, we’ll set something off and we’ll end up in some paradox, like maybe there’s a world like this one but made up of all the missing bits.”
“This other world… so, where old Anaheim would be… instead of Elfhaime?” Alexa pursed her lips when we all looked up at her. “What? I am studying Earth history and geography. Much of the anger in the conflicts stemmed from the loss of entire regions and their people. It’s important to understand that.”
“Learning about people dressing up as giant rats isn’t going to help anyone,” I scoffed. “I’m more worried about why Marshall was killed and what’s there that someone else wants. If it’s just elfin knickknacks, why would a human be interested? There a market for elfin arcane?”
“If there’s one for dragon eggs, why not sidhe stuff?” Cari pointed out. “It’s all speculation. We could be heading out there for nothing but a handful of beans and not a magic cow in sight.”
“I think the beans were magical. Not the cow.” I sighed when Ryder tilted my mug back, drinking down the rest. “You’re
not
coming with us, Cari. Your mother would kick my ass, and there’s not much left of it to kick.”
“My mother’s going to kick your ass anyway once she finds out you got blown up by a guy on a scooter.” Cari smiled at me, a Cheshire hint of trouble on her lips.
“Someone else had the launcher. Scooter had a machine gun or something.” I frowned. “And no. I’m not getting you killed somewhere off in Nevada. The less people who die on this trip, the better.”
“I’m hoping no one gets killed,” Ryder interjected. “The point of us going isn’t to die. I have no intention of dying. I’m concerned you all think I’m dragging you out on some kind of suicide mission.”
“Yeah, road to hell paved and all that.” I waved away his complaint.
“Look,
culero
, if I don’t go and Alexa doesn’t go, who’s going to cover your ass?” She blew a raspberry at me. “Besides, you need someone who can shoot—because no offense, but His Lordship here, he isn’t exactly Annie Oakley.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Ryder replied. “Marshall’s assistant? He used to be a Stalker.”
I DIDN’T
know what San Diego felt like before the Merge. Sure, I’d seen pictures, but there was something about putting my feet down on a piece of ground and feeling the world stretch out around me. I’d sat on the edges of the Imperial crest and watched sea faerie dragons turn the moonlit ocean into spangles of icy blue and gold light, seen a thunderbird scream through a valley filled with wildebeest and zebra for the sheer joy of feeling their terror, and bathed in the icy kiss of La Jolla’s tide pools after having sex on the beach with a pretty girl and beautiful boy whose names I’d never gotten.
When Dempsey’s knees gave out on him and he’d finally admitted he couldn’t hold his license any longer, I was surprised he’d chosen San Diego as the spot he wanted to rest his bones. It made some sense, I guess. Jonas was there, and we’d used San Diego as a sort of safe house for a few years before, but I’d have bet he’d want some place more… human and less elfin.
Because while the city remained pretty much intact following the knitting of the worlds, San Diego’s slate blue skies and serrated canyons practically burst with all creatures great and small… and mostly Underhill.
There were earth-born animals. Cats, dogs, rats, and raccoons as well as the occasional possum. The valleys and corridors below Pendle were filled with generations of escaped wild animals from an old safari park, and there were definitely descendants from the Balboa zoo wandering around—I’d gotten many a call to remove an overgrown fire salamander, only to find myself facing down a bloat-bellied crocodile. The Murphy caverns were home to lion prides who fed off the giraffe and zebra herds coming to drink from Kearny Lake. There was an occasional jaguar slipping into a car’s headlights on the winding road up to Kensington Flats and scaring a driver off the road, and camels roamed the flat plains near San Ysidro.
But they were merely specks of human existence compared to the teeming Underhill flora and fauna the city fought to hold off from consuming its gleaming metal spires and winding concrete freeways.
The wonder of Pendle’s dragons would never cease to amaze. Even with the very real danger of being eaten, people flocked to see them, paying countless thousands a year to be brought up to the mountain peaks to watch the air fill with wings, talons, and blood. Flame-feathered peacocks danced along the San Diego River’s delta once a year, its crystalline sands melting into slag beneath their fiery plumage as the fan-tailed birds turned deadly when the females came into season. Quartz roses bloomed along the remains of the 163 corridor, their leaves stripped clean by the wild giant pandas roaming freely through creaking bamboo forests. Swarms of blue glass butterflies settled on the unattended dead, scooping out tiny divots of rotting flesh with their curled tongues, their wings chiming a melodic warning if anything threatened their feed.
Then the sidhe had come to Balboa, and the human Underhill scholars who studied and argued at San Diego’s universities lost their freaking minds.
So the only words I could use to describe Ryder and I walking into the Old Spanish–style building housing the Underhill Studies department were
batshit fucking nuts
.
The squeaking and staring was enough to make me want to turn around and walk right back out.
Ryder’s hand on my upper arm was the only reason I kept walking.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to think of the sweeping adobe building with its arches and swarms of baby-faced scholars.
“It is different… humans and school… from what I am used to.” Ryder slowed his pace, taking in the open courtyard just beyond the front door. People glanced our way, some even paused to stare, but no one stopped either of us from crossing onto the grassy circles set among the paving stones.
The courtyard was enormous, nearly as big as my warehouse floor, and quite pretty. It reminded me of Elfhaime, twisted small trees and monochromatic blooms ranging from bleach-white to vivid crimson and every shade of pink in between. Water features kept the area cool, with a fall running down a slab of rough black granite set at one corner of the square. An open walkway ran around the outer paved area, and archways off the courtyard led to hallways and more doors. Curved padded seating dotted some of the grassy areas, but the streams of people scurrying in and out of the arches didn’t seem inclined to stop and navel gaze.
Until they spotted us. Ryder was oblivious to their stares, or he was entranced by the sudden appearance of a sidhe garden in the middle of a human compound. Either way, he stepped onto the paving and took a deep breath. He was a handsome sculpt of bone and gold amid the darks, pinks, and greens. I didn’t deny wanting him. My skin
sang
with the want of him, but surrendering to that desire meant handing myself over to Ryder, and I wasn’t quite ready—or willing—to do that.
“You see, for the sidhe—and maybe for the unsidhe as well—the teachers come to us, sometimes spending entire weeks with one child if what they knew interested the student. My historical studies instructor lived with us for nearly half a year.” He scratched his nose, hiding a smirk. “Although to be honest, I think my mothers were considering asking him to join their marriage. But this… gathering together into classrooms and being amongst other students, that is how your schooling was, yes?”
“Nope. Never went to school. It wasn’t… practical. Not for how we lived. We moved about more than the wind, and schooling required sitting still.”
“Are you serious?” Ryder sounded shocked, or at least stunned to silence, and stopped in midsniff of a blush-pink cabbage rose beginning to bloom. “None? At all?”
“Nothing formal. Dempsey’d put a gun in my hand nearly at the moment after I’d wiped myself clean for the first time so I could work.” I shrugged, touching one of the open roses, smearing pollen on my finger. “Mathematics I mostly did through some link courses, because somebody had to do the books and Dempsey is shit for saving money. It’s a bitch once they tossed letters into the mix, but I could plot trajectories like a demon vole digging for worms. Knowing how to blast a shotgun near a vortex helps with those kinds of things.”
I had no comparison to hold up to the university. Reading was something I’d learned out of desperation and boredom, only spurred on by a desire to please Cari’s mother when she asked how I was doing with Jonas’s instruction. The words came easily enough, simple patterns suddenly becoming drops of ink or pixels strong enough to create images in my head. I’d been afraid the first time I’d seen a cat in my mind at the invocation of three letters written on a page. It was spell craft and profane, changing my thoughts with a few passes of graphite and paper.
The words became sentences and then turned into stories, whispers of someone’s imagination reaching out to touch mine, hanging stars in the darkness of my mind until I possessed a milky universe of worlds where there’d only been a void before.
But judging from the look on Ryder’s face, he didn’t quite see it the same way.
“That’s almost criminal.” His mouth worked around the words, and I tried not to laugh.
“That statement there is practically my entire life up until this very moment,” I replied. “Now how about if we go chase down this ex-Stalker of the professor’s?”
“Are you sure you are up to it?” He’d been eyeing me—more than usual—since we’d met up at the warehouse.
“This? Today?” I stepped onto a paving path, smiling at a pack of students slowly wandering by. “Or this chasing our deaths in Nevada?”
They’d
wandered
by three times since Ryder veered off to look at the courtyard, and making eye contact seemed like the best way to move them along. If anything they slowed down, and one of them—a curly-haired, round-hipped girl who looked barely old enough to order her own
bao
—waggled her fingers at me.
I felt very old.
The students were young and naïve, unaware I had weapons on me and could kill at least twenty of them before anyone could react. They smiled and laughed, untouched by any grit and filth I’d had smeared into my skin since birth. My back hurt a bit, and there were still twinges in my joints, because being blown half a block by ruptured fuel cells and a rocket was never good for the body. And I was stuck with a sidhe lord who probably was lying to me about something.
So very,
very
old.
“I am glad you are doing this,” he replied in a low voice, startling me back to the oasis. “The Court ruins—”