by Lexi Blake
Quinn nodded tightly. “Yes, we do. They occupy one of the larger buildings on Pearl, though it’s McKay-Taggart Security on our plane. I use them for security at my human business corporation, though Taggart is so sarcastic I’ve thought seriously about unleashing a demon on him. It would be easy to slip one into his office. There are some particularly slimy ones that don’t care about consent that would do.”
I was confused. “So this Taggart guy can jump between the planes? That’s handy. Shouldn’t the Council know about that? I don’t care if his firm handles your human security, if he’s gone transplane, we should have some talks.”
Dev shook his head. “It’s not like that. Think of it like that inevitable episode on every sci-fi fantasy show where the heroes find dark versions of themselves in an alternate timeline.”
Dean’s eyes flared. “I never thought of it that way. Damn. Screw the corporate world. I could get into entertainment. We’ve got this show called Friends about a group of vampires in Manhattan who live on a floor way higher than they should be able to afford. A dark Joey would be awesome.”
Dev’s eyes rolled. “Yeah, humans are far superior when it comes to creativity. Anyway, there are infinite planes of existence but not people, apparently. You can run into yourself. Taggart has a mirror on the Vampire plane. I don’t like the idea that he’s after Summer. If he’s anything like his human counterpart, he’s ruthless. And doesn’t appreciate unique names.”
Dean pulled out what looked like a normal tablet. I was betting I couldn’t connect to my e-reader though. He frowned as he looked down at the screen. “The door opens two times a day. I’ll check the latest sessions.”
“I seriously doubt anyone knows Summer is here. She was coming in from the witch plane. If she’s anything like her mother, she would have been careful.” I had to hope we wouldn’t have to add bounty hunters to our list of problems.
“Well, a small army had found her,” Quinn pointed out. “We have to assume if they knew where she was, Taggart might as well. If he’s smart he already knows she’s running. He would be monitoring any kind of communications he could, and don’t think he wouldn’t have cameras on other doors. He’s not a moron. Just a judgmental asshole.”
“Yeah, that’s what my dad says.” Dean’s eyes went wide. “Oh, shit. He crossed over this morning. It looks like there are two of them and a transport hovercraft. He’s got an upgraded system and it’s almost silent. We need to take cover.”
I took off, following the path Quinn had lain out, and hoped we would get there in time.
Chapter Seventeen
Zoey
I landed hard on the ground, the breath slamming out of my body, and then I felt the ground thud beside me and realized I hadn’t come through that painting alone.
Danny. Danny had followed me through. I forced myself to turn and saw him lying a couple of feet away from me. Why?
“What the hell did you do?” I know that wasn’t the nicest thing I could have said given that we’d taken a hard tumble through space into another dimension, but I was pissed because he was the one who could have stood on the other side of the painting and coaxed a freaking rope through. I sat up and took a long breath, glancing around to try to see where we’d come in. I’d expected a door of some kind or a little strip where the fabric of reality had split, but there was nothing but blue sky and a sinking sun. We were in a field that seemed to be surrounded by forest. I should have gotten up and started trying to figure out what to do, but bitching at my husband was way easier and potentially more rewarding. “Why would you jump into the painting with me? You know where I am. You should be on the other side getting me out.”
A low groan came from my husband. “Zoey.”
I managed to get to my feet. “Did you even think about that? Our children are on another plane and we don’t know how to get to them. Only three people know where we are—Myrddin, Nim, and Liv. Zack doesn’t know. Trent has no idea we got eaten by a freaking painting.”
“Fuck, that hurt,” Daniel said, turning over.
It did hurt. It hurt like fuck but the vamp blood in my system had already taken care of the pain. It had done nothing for my indignation. Our kids were asleep in their beds and they didn’t even know that their parents were no longer on the same plane as them. I couldn’t treat this like some adventure. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Dev. “Suck it up. We need to figure out where Dev, Marcus, and Kelsey went and why they wouldn’t simply stay here and wait for a rescue.”
A horrible thought struck me. Time worked differently on different planes. What if in the hours since Dev had gone missing, years and years had passed here? What if Myrddin had done this so we could never get them back and now we were stuck here, too, and I wouldn’t see my kids again?
“Zoey, something’s wrong,” Daniel said.
“Yes, something’s wrong.” I had lost my cool, my ability to stay calm in the face of horrible circumstances. I used to be good at this, but then I had kids and they needed me and I was twelve kinds of freaked about being away from them. “Our kids are alone.”
“Zoey, something’s wrong with me.” He managed to turn over. “I can’t catch my breath.”
I dropped to one knee. He’d hit the ground hard, but he was a vampire. It shouldn’t have affected him at all. Danny had once hit the ground headfirst doing probably two hundred miles an hour and he’d been on his feet in seconds, ready to fight.
But we were on a different plane and that meant a different sun. Despite the fact that we’d been to the Seelie and Unseelie planes on a regular basis, they were actually subplanes of the Earth planes. His unique powers worked the same there because the suns were so similar. I looked up and the sun was low in the sky. I couldn’t tell anything from it, but it seemed to be affecting Danny. He sat up and put a hand on his chest.
“I think I’m okay. I feel weird though,” he admitted.
“Well, we’re on another plane and the sun’s rays might be different here. Is your skin burning?” The last thing I needed was Danny to not be able to handle the sun here.
He shook his head and managed to get to his feet. “No, I’m fine. Just hit the ground hard, I guess. Do you see Dev? My eyesight’s fuzzy.”
I stood in front of him and looked in his eyes. They were clear and blue. They looked normal. “What do you mean by fuzzy?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I can see fine, but it’s not as sharp distance wise. I don’t know. I must have hit my head. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll be fine.”
“No, we won’t be fine because we’re lost on another plane of existence.”
“I couldn’t let you go.”
“Of course you could. You could even now be trying to figure out how to open that little rip and sending down a ladder,” I argued. “You could have figured out how to keep that damn door open so we could all get out of here. Did you even think about that?”
“You know what I thought about? I thought about the fact that not a few hours before a prophet told me to choose you. I was freaking choosing you, Z.”
I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”
“Well then please continue to yell at me because that’s going to make things so much easier,” Danny shot back. “You think I don’t know what happened? You think I don’t understand that our kids are going to wake up and not one of us will be there? Yeah, I know what I did was stupid, but I could hear Gray’s words in my head. They were screaming at me. It was a stupid decision, but I couldn’t make another one. I was running on pure instinct and that instinct told me that no matter what happens, going after you was the only choice to make. I don’t need you yelling at me.”
He put his hand to his heart again and seemed out of breath.
He was right. Yelling and panicking weren’t going to fix a thing, and it could be affecting him. Daniel and I are connected on a base level. It’s called sympathetic transference, and sometimes his body trie
s to buffer mine. I still didn’t understand it but I did know that from time to time I affected him. Childbirth had been super hard on my vampire. I stepped up and put my hands on him. “All right. We can fight about it after we figure out how to get home.”
He lowered his head to mine and I heard him sigh at the connection. “I’ll let you yell all day. But now we need to figure out where our people are. And we need to stay close because I’m sure they’re working on a way to get us back.”
Sure they were. “And if this was Myrddin’s way of taking over the Council?”
His head came up, eye’s widening. “Are you kidding me? That’s ridiculous. Zoey, he tried to stop me. He yelled for me to stop.”
“What?”
“He freaked out when he realized I was going after you,” Daniel insisted. “He reached out to grab me, but I got away. I know you don’t like him, but he’s not out to get me. You have to find a way to forgive him because we need him to make a deal with the Hell plane.”
Forgive him for killing Lee? I wasn’t about to do that and I was confused because I didn’t get this play of Myrddin’s. Unless he’d fully intended for me to go into the painting and to save me, too. Daniel would have been incredibly grateful, and thinking about it, this would likely get Daniel to do anything the bastard wanted him to do. Myrddin had set up a problem so he could be the one to ride in and correct it. He’d probably wanted Daniel to watch as he brilliantly solved the issue. He would have “saved” me and I would be the ungrateful bitch who couldn’t see how amazing he was.
I hated that man. But the good news was he would likely act faster now that Daniel was here.
Or he would be free to do whatever he liked. Daniel had set up the Council to work even in his absence, but I was sure Myrddin would be right there to guide the Council during this dangerous time. If we found a way home or he finally rescued us, he would have an enormous amount of power and I would be in a corner again.
I took a deep breath and turned away. We had things to do as long as we were stuck here, and we weren’t the only ones who’d drawn the short straw. “I need to find Arwyna. Apparently Liv hasn’t lost as much of her power as we thought she had. She’s just started using it for evil.”
“I’m going to have a long talk with her about that.” Daniel moved to my side again, but it was easy to see he wasn’t working at one hundred percent. “I understand experimenting with spells, but if she truly did that without Arwyna’s consent, she’s broken the laws of our Council and she’s subject to punishment. Kelsey’s going to be upset.”
“We don’t have to talk to her about it until we get back.” At least I didn’t have to argue with him about whether or not it was okay that they’d treated the pixie queen like a lab rat. Liv would have a lot to answer for, but maybe Kelsey wasn’t the one to do it. I would talk to Hugo when we got back. I looked across the field and saw that Arwyna was still trying to find her priest. The spell compelled her even from another plane.
Liv still had power, and it looked like Nimue was helping her tap into it.
“She’s gone that way.” I had to believe this was where Dev had gone. Every wolf we had tracked him to Daniel’s office and lost the scent there. Kelsey had disappeared from Danny’s office. Marcus had been obsessed with that painting for months before he’d gone missing. They were all here and I would feel better when I figured out how much time had passed for them.
Or worse. Or I would panic and lose my shit again.
Danny jogged to keep up with me. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll fix this and we’ll fix your pixie friend. Maybe the spell will wear off once she makes it to Devinshea. That was the point of it after all. Hopefully she’ll be fine once she’s satisfied the intent of the magic.”
We had to hope that the spell hadn’t done permanent damage to her. She was moving from the field toward the forest.
“Hey, Z, look at that. I think she’s definitely on the right track.” I glanced over and Daniel had a grin on his face. He was pointing ahead of him. “Look at the grass.”
My heart caught in my chest and I suddenly teared up. “Dev.”
He’d told me once that in his sithein he could never hide because the grass grew wherever he walked. I was sure when he was a child that had been a messy thing, but he was an adult now and an ascended god, and he knew how to leave a trail. The grass had grown a few inches above the rest of the field, forming an easy to follow path. The grass was gleaming and glossy, more full of life than the rest.
Our fertility god was here and he’d left us a way to find him.
“If it had been weeks since he’d been here, the rest of the grass would have grown,” Daniel said, likely because he’d been afraid of the same thing I had. “This couldn’t have been here for more than a week. More than likely only a day or two.”
It gave me great comfort to know Dev hadn’t aged and died on this plane while we’d been sitting on our asses trying to figure out how to find him.
“I hate how sick she looks.” Her flight had gotten more erratic. She was steady one moment and then dropped a few feet the next. She fought to gain some altitude. “How can I help her?”
“I don’t think she’ll let you. I don’t know if she can even hear us. We have to hope Dev is close. I would call out, but I have no idea where we are and who’s…well, we know who’s not here anymore. Damn it.”
Up ahead I could see what Danny was talking about. Bodies. There were bodies on the ground. Please don’t let one of them be my husband. Please. The prayer formed a rhythm in my head the closer and closer we got to those bodies.
Daniel moved in front of me. “Stay back. We don’t know they’re dead. It could be a trap. Let me go first.”
I stopped and Danny moved in front of Arwyna, who hadn’t quite made it there yet. Her wings beat in an odd, unnatural rhythm as she sought to move around the big body now in her way. I breathed a deep sigh of relief when she flew slowly past Daniel and continued further into the woods. I stopped next to my husband, my mind much more at ease because I could see the trail continued on. I could take a breath and try to figure out what was happening.
“I think we can safely say Kelsey found Dev at least.” Daniel was staring down at a cocoon that probably contained a dead body. Dev liked to wrap his presents. Kelsey left her opponents lying on the ground. “She must have taken one of their swords. I don’t think she had Gladys with her.”
“No, I found out Myrddin has the Sword of Light,” I replied, measuring my every word as I looked around. There were several dead bodies and they looked like soldiers of some sort. They were all wearing the same type of clothes that made up a uniform, though it was easy to see this wasn’t a high-tech army. The clothes were made of animal skin, I would bet. They liked their facial hair, too. Hair of all kind, from what I could tell. They all had long hair and beards they had braided, though there was nothing feminine about these men. They looked barbaric.
I bet Kelsey had fun with them.
Daniel knelt down beside one of the bodies, studying the site as though trying to figure out what happened. I could tell him what happened. Dudes had thought Kelsey would be a fun way to spend an afternoon. Dudes found out she was the one who would have all the fun.
“I have to hope Marcus is with them,” Daniel said, “But there was at least one other female here. You see? Kelsey was wearing boots with a square heel. But someone else was wearing slippers of some kind. The footprint is small. It could be a kid or a woman around your size. I would have to study it more to figure out if Marcus’s prints are here. And Myrddin wants to run a couple of tests on the sword.”
“Does Kelsey know?”
Danny stood up. “We need to follow the trail, but stay close to me. I’m still not feeling well and we don’t know if there are more of these soldiers out here. Kelsey put Gladys in the armory. She was on vacation. I seriously doubt she cares if we run a few tests on a sword that belongs to the Council.”
“It belongs to the companions,”
I insisted. “I get that you’re the King of all Vampire, but I’m the queen of the companions and I want us registered as a separate entity, and you taking our sword without permission makes me think that’s more important than ever.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Danny replied, following me as I got back on the path Dev had left for us to follow. “I’ve always watched out for the companions. I’m the one who freed them.”
This was another fight I hadn’t been pushing. After learning about where the companions came from, I’d started to think about how we should be treated. It wasn’t merely enough that vampires weren’t allowed to kidnap and force us into marriage. “Good for you, but we’re a completely different class of supernatural creature and we need representation. And that sword belongs to us, Your Highness. I’m not joking about that. Kelsey might be your Nex Apparatus, but she’s my Hunter. I’m her queen and I won’t allow you to give our sword away even merely for experimentation.”
Daniel groaned. “This is neither the time nor the place to discuss this. You want to be queen of your own group, make an appointment and we’ll talk about it.”
He wouldn’t be making any appointments with me. “How would you feel if I took Excalibur without your knowledge?”
“That’s different and I certainly have allowed Myrddin access to Excalibur. I don’t get where this is coming from. He’s not going to hurt the damn sword.”
“The sword doesn’t like men touching her, and she had to put up with it for thousands of years,” I shot back.
“It’s a freaking…” Danny stopped and took a long breath. “Okay. When we get back, you and Kelsey can decide who gets to play with Gladys. Can we find Dev now?”
Our tension was building and I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to be able to hold my tongue now that Myrddin was back. He was creeping into all my relationships and I couldn’t allow it. Especially since I knew he would be coming after my son at some point.