“The baby.” The words tore from my throat. “Where’s the baby?”
Time stopped. Nobody moved. I felt like I was trapped in a nightmare.
“Where’s my baby?” I cried.
“Remember when you stopped to change memory cards?” Archie the troll said to Luke. “I think I saw Elspeth take her off to change her diaper.”
“Elspeth!” Luke’s roar soared to the rafters.
Nothing. Not even the faintest smell of stale waffles in response.
“Elspeth!” I cried. “Please, please don’t do this!”
“Do what?” Bunny’s eyes were troubled. I think I unnerved her more than the situation. “She’s your nanny. Honey, don’t get so upset or you won’t make it to Laria’s first birthday. It’s only a diaper change.”
She was smiling, but I wasn’t. The sense of dread that had been hovering around me for weeks grew exponentially stronger.
Luke and I burst out of the church. He collared his brothers, who had gone back to smoking near the front door.
“Have you seen the baby?”
“Sure, I have,” Kevin said, tossing his cigarette butt to the snowy ground. “You took our picture together, remember?”
Not the right answer.
“We think our nanny took her for some reason,” I said, trying not to sound like I was on the verge of hysteria. “Have you seen them?”
“You mean that Betty White lookalike who was all over Uncle Matt?” Patrick asked.
Luke nodded, his jaw muscles working furiously.
“I’m pretty sure I saw her about ten minutes ago.” Patrick pointed in the general direction of the cemetery grounds. “She was heading that way.”
“Was the baby with her?” Luke asked.
“Hard to tell,” Patrick said. “She was all huddled over.”
I closed my eyes and, dangerous or not, I sent thought probes out toward the old cemetery. One must have bounced off Luke’s sister Jen, because I heard an annoyed “Ouch!” from her direction but too bad. I almost cried with joy when a soothing wave of acknowledgment flowed through me almost immediately. Laria? It had to be. I have to admit I was surprised that a newborn could transmit such a strong signal. Surprised and more than a little bit proud. Laria’s response was followed closely by an angry and downright painful buzz that could only belong to Elspeth.
“They’re together,” I whispered to Luke as friends and relatives spilled from the church onto the sidewalk and into the street. I told him about the thought probes. “The baby is fine and she’s definitely with Elspeth.”
He said things he would live to regret if they were repeated in a court of law, but he was only human, after all, and very upset. “When I get my hands on that—”
“First find them,” I said, trying to quell my own rising panic, “then we’ll figure out what to do about Elspeth.” I gave him the thought probe coordinates, as best I could, and it definitely sounded like they were at or near the burial ground.
Sometimes Luke forgot exactly what he was dealing with here in Sugar Maple. Elspeth’s powers were formidable. The other trolls in town were in awe of her abilities. Even Janice, who was distantly related to her on Elspeth’s mother’s side, looked at the cantankerous old crone with unabashed awe. I couldn’t imagine Luke coming out ahead in any battle he fought with Elspeth.
Jack MacKenzie sprang into action while Luke and I exchanged information.
“Spread out,” Jack ordered his family. “Check every street, knock on every door, look behind every shrub. If nobody answers your knock, kick the door down, but find that baby.”
“Hold on a second!” Lilith’s husband, Archie, stormed up to Jack in high dudgeon. “Kick my door down and I’ll kick your ass!”
Lilith put a calming hand on Archie’s shoulder. “He’s upset, Archie,” she said in a soft voice. “He won’t really kick down our door.”
“The hell I won’t.” Jack stared at the short and furious troll. “That’s my granddaughter we’re talking about. I’ll burn this town down if that’s what it takes.”
Definitely not the right thing to say.
The town went berserk. The crew from Assisted Living aimed their scooters straight at Jack while calling out his ancestry in colorful terms.
Poor Jack. He had no way of knowing Sugar Maple’s back-story, how our foremothers and forefathers had fled persecution in Salem to find freedom here.
But there was a definite upside to the melee.
“Go now!” I whispered to Luke while the MacKenzies and the townspeople squared off. “You can find Laria and straighten this all out before Jack and Archie stop yelling at each other.”
He took off at a run for the burial grounds.
I turned to find Meghan looking at me with a quizzical look on her face.
“You take your crowd,” I said, “and I’ll take mine. We’ll hope for the best.” As long as magick didn’t break out and turn the garden-variety brouhaha into a nuclear meltdown we had a chance.
“Sounds like a plan,” she said and we waded into the fray.
“Frank!” I cried. “Manny! Rose! Everyone! Turn off those scooters and get a grip.”
“He threatened to burn down the town,” Archie the troll cried. “I heard him myself.”
“Why are we wasting time arguing?” Meghan said. “We should be out looking for Laria. She’s the only thing that’s important right now.”
“It’s the man’s grandchild, Archie,” Lilith said in that soothing voice of hers. “You can’t blame him for being upset.” And if she put the slightest extra emphasis on the word “man” only the magick would notice.
It worked. Archie backed down. Jack scaled back his rhetoric. And two minutes later they all headed out to scour Sugar Maple for my daughter.
“Where did Luke go?” Meghan glanced around at the departing crowd.
“He figured Elspeth might have taken the baby back to our cottage. He went to check.” Lies, lies, and more lies. I would have felt guilty, but the stakes were way too high. Besides, she’d never believe the truth.
“Funny thing,” Meghan said, looking at me intently, “but you don’t look half as upset as you did a few moments ago.”
Crap. As far as I knew she had never been a cop, but there was no doubt she had inherited the same detective genes as her brother. “This is a very safe town. Besides, she’s with her nanny.”
“You mean that weird Betty White lookalike.”
“Elspeth,” I said, “and I don’t really see the resemblance.” Definitely time to tone down the Hollywood vibe.
“Five minutes ago I thought you were going to have a stroke. Now you’re okay with it. Did I miss something?”
I made a silly face and rolled my eyes for emphasis. “Hormones,” I said, falling back on that age-old excuse for crazy behavior by both sexes. “One second I’m happy, the next second I’m crying my eyes out. And here I thought PMS was bad!”
It was a lie. I knew it was a lie and I’m pretty sure she did, too.
But then her new boyfriend texted her and she forgot about my lie, about me, about everything but the words on the screen.
Whoever he was, I owed him a big, fat thank-you.
24
LUKE
I took off for the burial grounds like the hounds of hell were after me. I shot down Osborne skidding on patches of ice and new-fallen snow.
Laria.
I could see her tiny face in front of me, hear those soft, mewling cries.
I’d known from the start that something wasn’t right with Elspeth. From the very beginning I could see we were headed down a dangerous road with the elusive, intractable troll Samuel had set on our house like one of the biblical plagues and I couldn’t understand why Chloe remained blind to the truth.
Hell, she could be mixed up with the Salem Fae who had settled in Sugar Maple a few months ago. The Salem Fae had pledged their loyalty but centuries-old animosities didn’t disappear overnight. Unless I missed my guess, not all of the Salem Fae had been in favor of the decision and it was just a matter of time before trouble started.
Sugar Maple existed and thrived in the world of mortals and you only had to spend five seconds with Elspeth to know her opinion of my species. Elspeth and the more disgruntled members of the Salem contingent? It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they had formed some kind of alliance.
First Elspeth marked my daughter’s head with some weird red dot and now it looked like she had spirited Laria off to an old burial ground where nobody except Chloe’s father was actually buried.
Nobody was going to take my child to a cemetery and perform some weird mumbo-jumbo rite. I’d had a bellyful of strange-ass shit since coming to Sugar Maple and I had learned to accept what was good and ignore the rest. But hell, Elspeth wasn’t even part of Sugar Maple. I didn’t give a damn that Samuel Bramford had given her marching orders before he pierced the veil or died or whatever happened to magicks when they left this realm. All I knew was that I was putting a stop to it now.
Elspeth’s back was to me as I approached, her cape spread out around her like a giant pup tent. She was crooning something in that rusty-nail voice of hers, more sounds than words, although if they were words they definitely weren’t in English. I listened hard for sounds from Laria, but heard nothing, and a hot rush of adrenaline shot through my veins.
I crept up slowly, quietly, careful to ease my feet into the snow rather than crunch my way toward her. Elspeth was magick and magick meant powers humans could only guess at. I had experienced magick for myself last spring and I knew exactly what I was up against. The troll might be old, but her powers were formidable. If she chose to turn them against me I didn’t stand a chance.
If she sensed my approach she didn’t let on. Maybe she was in some kind of zone. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t complaining. I needed time to locate Laria and scope out the situation before I made my move.
Except suddenly I couldn’t move at all. I tried to take another step and another. I didn’t feel different, but I hadn’t moved an inch. I watched in horror as Elspeth slowly began to rise above the ground until she floated a good ten feet off the earth, her gruesome black cape swirling in the snowy late afternoon wind.
“Fool.” Her tone was rich with scorn. “The truth lies before your human eyes, but ye cannot see. Go now before you cause unending harm.”
She was wrong. I could see, and what I saw was my daughter lying on the slab of stone that marked Aerynn’s resting place, surrounded by swirling clouds of color and light that entwined themselves around her tiny exposed limbs and danced across her forehead in shimmering formations that made me feel like puking.
“Touch her again,” I said, “and I’ll kill you.”
“’Twould be the human answer to everything,” she said, “but there be worse that can happen than earthly death.”
She swooped downward and cradled Laria’s tiny face between her gnarled hands and exhaled loudly into the baby’s mouth. My gag reflex kicked in and I came close to losing my breakfast.
The baby laughed, or what passed for a laugh in a one-week-old child, and then Elspeth vanished, along with the clouds and my paralysis.
I lurched forward, limbs strangely rusty with disuse even though only seconds had passed, and dropped to my knees next to Aerynn’s memorial stone. A familiar buzzing moved through me, the same feeling I always got when I visited the burial ground. They may not have interred bodies here, but there were enough energies present to light Sugar Maple for centuries to come.
Laria gurgled, her arms outstretched in the loosely wrapped blanket. I noticed a faint damp sparkle smeared across her forehead, but other than that she appeared happy and unharmed. I bundled her up tightly and, holding her against my chest inside my shirt, made my way quickly back to Chloe before anything else happened.
“I know you’re following me,” I said out loud as I plowed through unshoveled snow. “I can smell you, Elspeth.”
There was no response, but the odor of stale waffles intensified the closer we got to the old church we used as a town hall. The crafty old bitch was cloaking, biding her time until she could swoop in and pull another one of her tricks.
Whatever the hell she was up to, it had to stop now before it was too late.
CHLOE
Luke had found Elspeth and Laria at the old cemetery just as I’d hoped. He pulled me aside and told me about the ceremony he had interrupted and although I tried to tamp down his nuclear anger with soothing words about rituals and traditions from the Old World I was seriously freaked out. Who in their right mind would take a lightly covered newborn out in a winter snowfall? And don’t get me started on the whole stretched-out-on-a-grave-marder-and-blowing-in-her-mouth thing or I’d really go off.
None of it made any sense. Elspeth was here to protect Laria, not harm her, but the things she had done since the baby’s birth often fell into the second category. Was it possible she had a hidden agenda, one that had nothing to do with the reason Samuel had sent her to us before he left this dimension forever? Luke definitely thought so.