“This whole thing makes no sense,” Luke railed. “If he’s Fae, why is he driving? Why didn’t he just magick them wherever they’re going?”
Elspeth started spinning madly across the dashboard. “Questions, questions. Ye should be seeking answers, not asking more questions.”
I shot Elspeth what I hoped was a cautionary look, then turned to Luke. “Transition was hard on you and you’re a grown man,” I reminded him. “Imagine what it would do to a mostly human infant.”
Which to my mind definitely proved Elspeth’s assertion that, at least for now, Laria wasn’t in physical danger. I shivered at the thought of what other dangers might lie ahead for her.
Locals sometimes complained about the lack of new roads in our county, but right now that seemed like a blessing. The fewer choices Laria’s kidnapper had, the better our chances of finding him.
“No!” Elspeth shrieked as Luke rounded a curve. “That way, human, that way!”
She waved her hands and the next thing I knew the car veered to the right and headed straight for the dense woods that ringed Sugar Maple.
Luke struggled to maintain control of the wheel, but it was literally out of his hands. “We’re going to hit the trees!”
Trust Elspeth . . . trust Elspeth . . . trust Elspeth . . .
We didn’t hit the trees. Not exactly. We went right through them like threading a needle, exploding through massive trunks but leaving no damage behind, and we kept on going, faster and faster, until I saw nothing but a tunnel of trees leading us deeper into the woods.
“Holy shit!” Luke yelled.
But I couldn’t yell. I couldn’t even breathe. The woods seemed unimaginably dense. We were plunged into primeval darkness, crashing blindly through trees but leaving them whole and untouched in our wake. Even more amazing, we were whole and untouched as well. Maples, poplars, white birch. Nothing could stop us. Not when our daughter’s future was at stake.
My magick might have been in remission since Laria’s birth, but my maternal instincts were alive and well and telling me my baby girl was very close.
30
CHLOE
We had just come out the other side of a towering pine when Luke’s mother called again.
“Bunny will go crazy if it rolls into voice mail,” I said. “She’ll be dialing 911 so fast our heads will spin.”
Elspeth leaped from the dashboard to the console and started jumping up and down on Luke’s cell, flipping it to speakerphone mode.
“No!” she screeched. “No! No! No!”
Which of course made Luke answer it.
“Been a long time.” A familiar voice filled the car and an overwhelming sense of dread grabbed me by the throat.
“Dane,” I whispered. “It’s Dane!”
This time last year we had been engaged in a battle to the death with his mother, Isadora, a terrifyingly powerful Fae warrior queen. Only it wasn’t Isadora who had died in this dimension, it was her son Dane. Cruel, beautiful, bone-deep-evil Dane. Isadora had launched a death bolt at me and I’d conjured a glass shield to protect myself. The death bolt careened off the shield and went straight for Dane, slicing him in two and forever isolating him from Sugar Maple and the human realm where he had spent so much of his life.
The end of his earthly existence had been an accident but one for which I felt no guilt and definitely no remorse. His only goal had been to do his mother’s bidding and she had wanted both Luke and me dead.
And now Dane was back.
Even Elspeth looked frightened.
An unpleasant laugh made the phone vibrate. “Surprised? I thought you would be. I tried to leave a few clues, but pregnancy made you a little slow, Chloe.”
Luke muttered something ugly under his breath and I motioned for him to be quiet. Elspeth was frozen in place on the console, one booted foot resting on Luke’s cell phone. I was a half step away from hysteria and struggling to hold it together for the sake of my baby.
“So you’re behind it,” I said. “I saw the glitter. I should have pieced it together.”
“It’s not too late for you, Chloe,” he said in his silkiest, most seductive voice. “Laria should have her mother with her.”
Luke’s head snapped in my direction. I saw terror in his eyes.
“Where are you taking her?”
He blew past the question. “You’re wasted on humans, Hobbs. Remember that night by the lake? You were so young, so innocent. I—”
Luke picked up the phone and threw it out the window.
“Are you insane?” I totally lost it. “That was our only hope of finding Laria. He was going to lead us to her.” Last year Dane’s brother, Gunnar, had communicated with me through Penny, my beloved store cat, as a way of reaching between dimensions. Today Dane had used Bunny’s phone call as a conduit.
“Sports radio—you gotta love it.” His voice surrounded us, spilling from every speaker. I could almost feel it slithering down my arms like warm, poisonous honey. “So how are those Pats doing this year, MacKenzie?”
Luke was a lethal weapon poised to strike, but this time he reined in his emotions and sat still, poised and waiting.
“We’re coming for Laria,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “You can’t stop us.”
“Join us,” he said again. “I can offer you a world of pleasures you’ll never know with the human.”
Luke’s jaw was so tight I was surprised it didn’t snap in two.
“I want my baby,” I repeated. “She is a Hobbs. Sugar Maple is her birthright.”
“She’s one of ours now,” he said. “And what promise she has!”
Elspeth motioned for me to keep him talking. We were still deep in the woods. Our headlights quit and we were plunged into utter darkness. I motioned for Luke to keep quiet. Whatever Elspeth was trying to do we needed to give her the best shot.
And then I felt it. A tingling sensation that began at my scalp, then moved down my spine and back up again, faster, stronger, as we pushed deeper into the forest. We were getting closer. I could feel Laria everywhere. My breasts grew heavy with milk.
We darted left, then right, and suddenly our headlights came back on and I saw a flash of pink and movement about a football field away.
I grabbed Luke’s hand and held it tight. We were almost there. Laria was almost safe. There was no way in heaven or hell we would let Dane or his minion drag our child beyond the mist.
I wasn’t paying any attention to what Dane was saying. I just let him talk while Elspeth maneuvered the car closer and closer to our goal.
We approached a clearing and the flash of pink grew larger.
Laria was lying deep within a cluster of evergreens. She was still in her car seat and snugly wrapped against the cold in her travel blanket. James, or whatever his name really was, stood next to her, staring up at the sky. Our Jeep was tucked deep within a thicket with only its front end visible.
He was beautiful in the staggering way of all Fae. There was no way he could be mistaken for anything else. No wonder Meghan and Bunny had been overwhelmed by his looks. If he had appeared that way to me I would have looked twice as well, but Dane was too clever for that. We knew all about façades in Sugar Maple and he must have allowed me to see what he wanted me to see and not what was really there.
Dane had found his Fae equal in beauty and sent him out into my world to create havoc, beginning with Luke’s sister.
Stripped of a physical presence in our dimension he needed a surrogate to carry out his plan to snatch Laria.
Could James see us watching him? He gave no indication. He reminded me of a wax dummy, lifelike in every way but the one that really mattered. He had no soul. He was Dane’s perfect creation.
I reached for the door handle, but Luke grabbed me.
“We haven’t stopped yet. You’ll be hurt.”
“She needs me. I have to—”
Elspeth’s high scream stopped me in my tracks. She spun from the back of the car to the front, her screams growing higher, louder, more intense, and just when I thought my eardrums were going to burst I saw what she was screaming about.
Dropping through the night sky was a busted-up blue Toyota and it was headed straight for us.
Luke grabbed the wheel and turned it as far left as it would go, but nothing happened.
“Son of a bitch, that’s the car that ran us off the road,” he said, still struggling with the wheel.
The old blue car that had spun out on the snowy road the night Laria was born. The same car that had taken off without checking to see if we were all right.
His sister’s car.
It was all falling into place too late to matter.
“Hold on!” Luke yelled, placing an arm across my chest. “We’re gonna hit!”
The sound exploded inside my skull. In the blink of an eye I was six years old again, lying on an icy road while my parents lay dying in what was left of our car.
The car split open like a grape. I was torn from my seat and sent flying across the hood, spinning down toward the ground below. The sickening crunch of metal against metal was followed by a loud grunt from Luke and Elspeth’s high-pitched keening.
Twisted metal and glass sprayed everywhere, falling into the trees and cutting into my face and hands as I hit the ground hard. I tried to curl myself up into a ball to protect my back, but I felt the impact in every bone.
I heard nothing from Luke or Elspeth.
The silence was the most frightening thing of all, but it didn’t last long. Suddenly the old blue Toyota exploded, sending a fireball over the tops of the trees and into the night sky, where it quickly dissipated.
I tried to stand up, but my right knee buckled and I dropped back to the ground. I regrouped and tried again. We couldn’t be more than thirty or forty yards away from Laria, but I couldn’t see through the all-encompassing darkness that surrounded me. I would have to rely on instinct.
“Chloe.” It was Luke, his voice low and weak.
I followed the sound and almost tripped over his prone body.
“Elspeth,” he said. “She’s dead.” He had seen her hit the ground headfirst, then tumble end over end until she disappeared from his sight.
My sorrow ran surprisingly deep, but, like so many things tonight, mourning Elspeth would have to wait.
“The baby is about sixty yards away. Make a quarter turn to your right and pace it off. He’s there with her.”
“We can do it,” I said. “We can get her back.”
“Chloe,” he said, “I can’t move. Both legs are broken.”
Time stopped. I tried to take in his words, but the screaming inside my head wouldn’t stop.
“You have to do it, Chloe. You’re all Laria has.”
“I can’t. My magick—”
“It’s there. Look at your fingertips.”
So my magick really was coming back.My fingertips were beginning to glow like the old-school cigarette lighter in my ancient Buick. I didn’t know why or how it was happening—an offshoot of my adrenaline rush or maybe fear for Laria’s safety—but it didn’t matter. I needed every advantage I could get.
31
CHLOE
There was nothing left to say. I kissed him, then turned away before I started to cry. Dane’s presence was everywhere, a biting edge that made the hairs on the back of my neck lift in response.
“Join us,” James said, but I knew the words were Dane’s.
I ran toward the baby but yelped as I hit a wall of electricity.
“I need to hold Laria.”
“Like any other good mother.”
Instantly I realized James was terribly young. As beautiful as he was, and he was shockingly glorious, he was still unformed. As the Fae age, their beauty takes on a complexity that dazzles the heart as well as the eye. James hadn’t reached that point yet. He was early spring. The promise of summer still lay ahead.
But there was something more there. I just couldn’t pinpoint exactly what.
“You like what you see.” It was a statement, flat and without affect.
“You’re Fae,” I said with a shrug. “Everyone likes what they see.”
Suddenly the expression in James’s eyes ignited and waves of heat flowed toward me.
“We have unfinished business between us.”
“No,” I said, keeping Laria in my line of vision. “Whatever business we had is long finished.”
James pulled me into his arms and I heard Luke’s cry of outrage from behind me.
Go with it,
I told myself.
Find out what he wants before you make a move.
There would be no second chances.
The look in James’s icy blue eyes was Dane unmasked and it took every ounce of strength I had not to recoil.