As the final word rolled off my tongue, and the veil split at last to allow us through, Saoirse spoke to calm her budding nerves: “Say, I forgot to ask, what exactly did that sea god guy owe you a favor for anyway?”
“Oh,” I replied as we began to slip through the ground into the endless void, “some years back, I helped Manannán resolve a dispute over his ship. Nothing big. It just involved some redcap pirates, a banshee thief, and a yeti with an RPG launcher.”
“Wait, what?”
It was too late for me to answer. Our heads dropped under the cusp of the circle, and we careened off once more through the blackness, back toward Earth, back toward the battle for Kinsale, back toward our adversary who was preparing to cast a spell with a magic harp and a heaping helping of conceit that would incur the wrath of the wrong kind of fae.
It was fine though. I could always tell the yeti story later.
Chapter Sixteen
Iron lay before me. In the form of a dismantled wrought iron fence that someone had stacked in sections against the wall of the shed where Saoirse and I popped into existence. I stifled a warbling wail of terror at the sight of enough iron to cut me into a pile of smoking pieces and let out a faint squeak instead, which alerted Saoirse to a problem. She released me and whipped around, gun at the ready, expecting an enemy, only to find a wall and a bunch of inanimate metal pieces.
“Sorry,” I whispered. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Saoirse glanced at me, eyebrow raised. “Iron, I’m guessing?”
“Yeah, you know that innate fear of the dark all humans have? Iron is that fear for fae.”
“Oh, well, don’t worry.” She patted my shoulder. “I’ll protect you from the mean old fence.”
“You’re hilarious.” I examined the shed and found the door to my right. “Anyway, I’m guessing we’re in the back yard of the correct property. Let’s see if we can sneak a peek of what we’re up against.”
The two of us made our way to the door as quietly as possible. The shed was an obstacle course, strewn with toolboxes and lawn care equipment, wrenches and hammers hanging from the walls by nails driven into the wood. Every step I took, I feared making a loud noise by putting pressure on a warped floorboard or nudging the wrong object with my elbow. And Saoirse, with her human sight so weak in the dark, must have had it far worse. But we both reached the door without tripping and causing a ruckus that would give us away to anyone guarding the property. Then we carefully peered through the tiny gap between the double doors, one of them left open a fraction of an inch.
Beyond the shed was a modest yard covered in dead, damp grass that led to the two-story house I’d expected. The house had been painted a light blue before the collapse, but years of hard weather had chipped away at the paint, and it was now a faded white and peeling in places. The windows on the back side of the house were all intact, the ones on the ground floor shuttered, the ones on the top floor offering no view of the interior thanks to pulled curtains. Through those curtains and shutters, I spotted no light sources, nor did I hear any movement inside, even when I focused my heightened hearing to catch the softest of sounds.
“See anything?” Saoirse all but mouthed close to my ear.
I shook my head. “No activity at all. There’s no one above ground.”
“Maybe the basement?”
The lone basement window, too narrow for either of us to slip through, was boarded up.
“There’s one more thing I can check,” I said, and this time went on the hunt for any traces of magic. I scoured the house from the flagging antenna that had long lost its usefulness all the way down to the faux-brick skirt that lined the base of the home, the veneer heavily eroded in places from the continual battering of heavy rains and snows. It was always difficult to sense magic through the earth, something about ley lines and the flow of natural energy. But I pushed the spiritual sensory organ that let me detect magic as hard as I could without breaking it, steady gaze on the basement, willing any hints of our enemies to trip my alarms.
Just when I was about to give up and declare the house a bust, nothing but another laborious stop on our long road to solving this mystery, I caught the most tenuous wisp of magic emanating from one side of the basement. I couldn’t determine its purpose or its origin, but there it was, plain as day: a sign that someone with magic in their bones was in the house, or had been recently.
I gave Saoirse the hand signal that meant, Follow my lead, threw a rudimentary veil over us both, and opened the shed door wide enough to slip through. To cross the yard, I had to take a roundabout path so I didn’t wind up splashing my way through the massive puddles and announcing my approach to anyone within five blocks. Saoirse trailed me, stepping where I stepped so we didn’t leave two sets of prints in the mud, and the ones we did leave were indecipherable. We crept up to the back wall of the house and slid along the siding until we reached the small wooden deck that led to the back—
I threw up my arm so Saoirse couldn’t pass me on the deck steps as my mind screamed DANGER so loudly it echoed from ear to ear. For a long moment, I couldn’t figure out what the heck had tripped my senses. I slowly rolled my eyes, taking in the fenced yard again, the shed in one corner, the dark and cloudy sky above, the roof of the house with its missing shingles, the faded siding, cracked in places, the back door, the deck…That’s it.
Dropping my attention to the steps beneath me, I saw more clearly what my peripheral vision had noticed: a tripwire stretched across the second step from the top, placed exactly where someone’s shoe would snag it as they were ascending. I pointed it out to Saoirse, and we both tracked it to a grenade taped to one of the deck’s support posts and largely hidden by the crisscrossing diagonal skirt.
Saoirse, wearing a perturbed frown, mouthed, The house is a trap.
I replied in kind, And a warning bell.
Gingerly stepping over the tripwire, I padded across the deck, on alert for any more booby traps. I figured the back door was also rigged to blow the moment someone opened it, so I ignored it for the time being. I climbed onto the deck railing where it connected to the exterior wall, and shook the kinks out of my muscles as I gauged the amount of strength I’d need to reach my destination. Next, I jumped straight up to the second-story window above the deck and grasped the sill.
The greater distance between Saoirse and me strained the construct of the veil. I pushed more energy into it to keep it stable as I reached up, stuck my hand through the torn screen, and pushed on the window.
The window was locked. I gave it a glower and threw a bolt of energy at it. Then it wasn’t locked anymore. So I opened it, thankfully without making enough noise to wake the dead, and clambered through the ragged hole in the screen that snagged at my coat and somehow managed to reopen the cut on my ear, hot blood once again running down my neck. I made it into the upper-story bedroom, however, and didn’t even knock over the dresser under the window. That counts as a win, right?
Once I was situated and had given the room a quick scan to make sure no svartálfar were hiding in the closet or under the bed, I looked down at Saoirse and gave her the wait signal. In an eerily similar situation to my awful trip to Walter Johnson’s house, I tiptoed out of the bedroom and made my way down to the first floor of a house I knew to be under the control of an enemy. But I didn’t run face first into any enemies this time, nor did they sneak up behind me like the ghouls. The kitchen and living room were unoccupied, all the doors on the ground floor fully closed.
Still, I approached the back door with trepidation, eyes and ears on the lookout for any creatures hiding behind the furniture or in dark corners, waiting to lunge and rip my throat out. I found the back door rigged like I’d thought it’d be, but the setup was as basic as the trap on the deck steps. Just two grenades taped to the door and a wire attached to the bottom of the doorframe, so that when you opened the door, it would pull the pins, and boom. No more door. And a nasty surprise for anyone walking in.
Of
course, the blast wouldn’t take down a paranormal, not even a human practitioner, but that wasn’t the point. The grenades were merely meant to warn someone about an intruder on the premises.
I disabled the booby trap and opened the door.
Saoirse was waiting on the other side, foot tapping impatiently.
Neither of us spoke as we proceeded down the hall, to the door I wagered led to the basement. Since this door was almost certainly rigged to blow as well, I had to figure out a new way around the trap, because there was no alternate entry point to the basement. My solution wasn’t elegant, but it was effective: I opened the door the tiniest fraction, giving me a line of sight to the wire. Then I stuck my finger into the gap, siphoned a small amount of magic energy to the tip of my finger, and extended that energy forward like a blade. The “blade” sheared through the wire, and the two ends fell away.
Nothing went kaboom, and I didn’t die. So far, so good.
I pushed the door all the way open, revealing the steep, rickety stairs leading to the basement. I turned to Saoirse, who’d been loitering behind me, and mouthed, Stay alert. Possible ambush.
She nodded, took a SWAT stance, both hands on her gun, and replied, Ready.
The trip down the stairs was filled with faint squeaks, tense pauses, and the occasional collision, where Saoirse bumped into me because she couldn’t see where she was going. Strangely, even I could barely see in the darkness of the basement, despite my faerie senses. It was as if the air literally teemed with black ink. It wasn’t until I stepped off the stairs and pivoted around to the side of the basement where I’d caught the faint magic signature that I realized the dense shadow was part of yet another trap.
There was a thick metal door in the wall that didn’t match the rest of the basement. A new addition. And before that door was a minefield of tripwire grenades, visible to me only because I knew where to look for the explosives, black lumps protruding from the walls and the ceiling joists. I couldn’t see the actual wires. The low-power murk spell etched into the doorframe ensured that even the most heightened paranormal senses wouldn’t be able to cut through the darkness.
“Damn,” I whispered.
Saoirse shuffled closer to me and said into my ear, “What is it?”
I explained.
She worried her lip. “Can you disable the spell?”
“Without alerting the caster? Doubtful. They’ll sense the dissipation of their magic. I might be able to subvert it though, if I can get closer.”
“Why do you need to be closer?”
“Because spells also tend to have built-in ‘alarms’ that signal the caster if they’re being tampered with. You have to stifle them quickly. But the farther you are from the ward you’re trying to manipulate, the greater the delay between you giving your magic energy instructions and your energy responding to those instructions.”
“Crap. So what do we do? You have to get past the tripwires to get closer.”
“You stand way back there”—I pointed to the other end of the basement—“while I make like a contortionist and climb through the wires.”
“You just said you can’t see them.”
“I can’t.” I stripped off my coat and folded it up, offering it to her. “But I can see the grenades, and I have a rough grasp of trigonometry. I can approximate where the wires are.”
She snatched the coat from me, scowling. “You’re going to blow yourself up.”
“Nah. I can throw up a shield. The bigger problem is alerting whoever’s at the end of the tunnel behind that door.”
“Where do you think it goes?” She tucked my coat under one arm and gripped her gun with both hands again. “Another house in the neighborhood?”
I gave her a thin smile. “Probably cuts under the road to the house across the street. I’m thinking the harp was delivered here, then carried along through the tunnel to the real base of operations, with a number of goons, at least one of whom was a magic practitioner, leaving booby traps in their wake. That way, if someone tracked the harp here…”
“They’d hit a trap, causing a ruckus,” Saoirse picked up, “which would alert everyone across the street to the fact they’d been found out. And while the person or persons in this house recovered from the grenade blast and tried to avoid setting off more, all the bad guys would grab or destroy any incriminating evidence in their real base, then rush out of the house and flee into the woods a few blocks north of here.”
“Clever.” I rubbed my gloved hands together as I eyed the literal minefield in front of me. “But not that clever.”
“I don’t know. This whole scheme stayed under wraps right up until the last minute.” She felt all her pockets until she found her phone and covered the screen to diminish the glow as she checked the time. “It’s quarter after two. The spell’s supposed to be cast at three, the witching hour. Maybe whoever’s running this gig just figured he wouldn’t need a better-hidden base because no one would show up to stop him in time. A touch of arrogance, for sure, like you said, but considering how close to the wire we are”—she glanced at the minefield—“no pun intended, I don’t think this guy overestimated himself by much. I mean, you only stumbled onto this whole operation because you were literally led into it by a third party. If that hadn’t happened…”
“Yeah.” I frowned. “That still rubs me the wrong way. I hate being played.”
She chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Do you have any idea who might’ve wanted to drag you into this?”
“Not yet.” I dropped the pitch of my voice. “But rest assured, I’ll find out.”
Saoirse dipped her head. “You should. I can’t stand the idea of people being moved around like pieces in somebody’s game.”
“Me either. Which is precisely why I don’t live among the fae.”
She winced. “You think one of them hired that ‘Tom’ guy to trick you?”
“Oh, definitely. That’s not up for debate. The real question is which faerie?” I rolled my shoulders and searched the walls and rafters for the nearest black shape that roughly equated to a grenade. “But that’s a riddle we can solve after we save the day.”
Saoirse backed into the farthest corner when I began my approach to the door. “Seriously, Vince, don’t set one of those things off.”
“I’m not making guarantees. You know how guarantees pan out for cops.”
A brief silence. Then a sigh. “Right. Just get it over with.”
Chapter Seventeen
Like an art thief in a cat suit corkscrewing through a gallery of lasers, I bent and stretched and contorted my way across the minefield, sometimes coming within an inch of a tripwire, my skin sensing its presence in the darkness. At one point, halfway to the door, I lost my footing on a slick patch of concrete. I had to brace myself against a support beam, which caused me to inadvertently brush a wire with my ear. I froze. Waited for that disastrous telltale plink of a pin being pulled.
But it didn’t come. I hadn’t put enough pressure on the wire. Lucky break, Whelan, I thought as I breathed out a deep sigh of relief, heart still pounding against my ribs. Steadying myself, I ducked under the tricky wire and continued on.
When I passed the bulk of the grenades and emerged into a clear space in front of the door, I had the urge to jump up and cheer. But I couldn’t. Because there was yet another tripwire about six inches above my head. If I ever saw another tripwire grenade after tonight, I swore to all hells I was going to shove it down its owner’s throat. The constant threat of being consumed by fire, my natural enemy, was grinding on my already frayed nerves, and my winter-tuned magic was grumbling about it too. It was almost worse than the threat of the barghest hanging over my head.
Which reminds me, that thing will track me down soon now that I’m back on Earth. Better hustle.
I shuffled up to the doorframe and crouched to examine the murk spell more closely. It was a basic construction designed to bend light in ways that would create the illusion of a dense black fog
within a certain area. There were several ways to subvert the spell without breaking it, and I went with the easiest because it was also the quickest:
Shooting threads of my own magic energy into the glowing symbols on the wall, I strangled the alarm response before it could alert the caster by walling it off from the rest of the construction, then bridged a few of the spell’s lines, added on to its symbols, to alter the layout of the murk in the basement. When I was done, the abnormal darkness behind me was missing a big chunk in the middle, revealing the tripwires and clearing the way for Saoirse to cross the room.
I threw a grin over my shoulder and beckoned for her to give me the pleasure of watching her relive her childhood gymnast days. She scowled the entire way through the minefield, and I swore she almost tripped one of the wires out of spite. She emerged on my end with a graceful tuck and roll that made my own efforts look like those of a stumbling drunk, and brushed her clothes off as she stood up. “You tell anyone about that,” she muttered, “I’ll have Kennedy raid your store.”
If there ever was a better threat, I hadn’t heard it.
After slipping my coat back on, I motioned for Saoirse to stand off to the side with her gun ready in case something jumped out at me when I opened the door. But besides a faint squeak of the hinges as I heaved the thick metal slab aside, there were no sounds on the other end. No rushing footsteps. No sizzling magic. No clicking guns. Just a wave of dank air that had been cooped up in the tunnel that cut underneath the road and led to our perp’s home base.
I considered briefly whether a veiled ambush could be lying in wait in the darkness. But since human goons wouldn’t be able to stop me regardless, and svartálfar were fans of direct confrontation, I doubted anyone would attack us in the tunnel. If anything, there’d be a large group of guards camped out on the other end, behind another metal door, on the lookout for intruders coming by way of their “secret entrance.” In which case, Saoirse and I would simply have to come up with a strategy to sneak past them and not raise the alarm.
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