Music to My Sorrow

by Mercedes Lackey

  Slower still, maybe in the lower three digits now. Green road signs flashed by, much too fast to make out. The center line was still one continuous blur. Instinctively she gripped the handlebar and tucked her head down behind the windscreen.

  The high humming began to be replaced with the roar of the wind, and the faint breeze became stronger by the moment.

  Slower still—ninety? a hundred? A sign for someplace called "Cape May" flashed by. Now the wind was a real wind, pulling at her jacket and whistling over the helmet. She tucked Molly's head tightly against her chest, wishing that somebody made pug-sized biker-goggles. Or at least, that she'd thought to stick Molly inside her jacket while they were still traveling their own private wormhole.

  There was a flash of pink at the side of the road. It whipped past almost before she'd registered it.

  Oh, god. Is that—?

  It had looked like part of Big Pink, Margot's car.

  Had there been an accident?

  Oh, no, please.

  Kayla flinched inwardly, bracing herself for what she might encounter with a sense of pure nausea. Sure, she could heal damage, but what people tended to forget was that before she could fix injuries, she had to feel them, most of the time. There was no way you could call that fun by any stretch of the imagination. And there was always the problem that if someone was hurt bad enough, she could get sucked into their pain and need and they'd both die. . . .

  Lady Day slowed still further, and Kayla saw a sign: Myers Corners Exit: 1 Mi.

  They took the ramp. Someone had laid serious rubber all the way down recently, she noted. Her tension eased a little. Maybe not an accident.

  Lady Day coasted down the side road in an eerie silence, and it took Kayla a moment to realize that she wasn't hearing engine noises from the elvenbike. Well, they were pretty much optional.

  And up ahead . . .

  There were four people standing in a little knot at the side of the road. From their body language, things were uncomfortable, but not critical. And nobody was hurt.

  Eric. Magnus. Ace. Hosea. Alive and well.

  And . . . Margot's car?

  No. . . .

  * * *

  "What are you doing here?" Eric demanded, as Kayla swung off the elvenbike and walked toward them. For some reason, she had Molly-the-Pug with her, and the little dog danced around in circles at the end of her leash, barking joyfully.

  Well, at least someone was happy. Poor little flea-bait probably hadn't seen real countryside in her entire life.

  "I was out walking the furkid when your ride lit up," Kayla said, shrugging. "I figured she was going wherever you were, and I didn't want to miss the fun. An' it wasn't like your bike was going to wait for me to park the dog with Toni or anything. So what the hell's going on? The Unseleighe Court set up shop in Jersey?"

  She'd meant that as a joke. Unfortunately, of course, she could probably tell by his face that it wasn't. And he had decided it was time to break chapter one of the Book of Bad News to her.

  "Actually . . . yeah," Eric said. "And we need to get to a phone pronto."

  "Well," Kayla said, dropping the leash—Molly immediately ran to Ace and began making shameless overtures—and digging in her backpack, "how about if a phone comes to you?"

  She retrieved the phone and held it out, still not quite able to take her eyes off the wreck of the car behind the four of them. "Fully charged. I checked this morning before I went out."

  * * *

  It was six-twenty in the morning, but Ria Llewellyn had already been at her desk for over an hour. A multinational holding company didn't sleep, and if there was one thing the Threshold disaster had taught her, it was that the price of "clean hands" at the corporate level was eternal vigilance over the doings of one's underlings.

  Fortunately, eternal vigilance was a little easier on someone who was half elven. Elves didn't sleep as such, and half elves, while they did need to recharge, didn't need a lot of sleep; two hours, maybe three. Which was proving to be a good thing.

  Especially these days, when the world seemed to be taking the fight against terrorism as a blank check to impose measures large and small that had nothing to do with anti-terrorism, and everything to do with the convenience of government and big business. What was it Jefferson had said about a government big enough to supply everything you needed was big enough to take away everything as well? Ria had no objection to making money herself—money could buy so many pleasant things—but there were sane and reasonable limits, which one had to fight tooth and nail to maintain, it seemed. . . .

  The Arabs had a saying too; if you let the camel's nose into the tent, pretty soon you had the whole camel in there.

  But LlewellCo wasn't the only thing occupying her at the moment. Would that it were. The charter for the Ria Llewellyn Foundation was an ongoing series of minor annoyances, as was the purchase of a suitable large and isolated parcel of land on the East Coast to build what Eric insisted on calling "Hogwarts West" upon. There was deciding how best to settle the matter of Michael and Fiona Banyon once and for all. Reviewing Derek's latest memorandum to Judge Springsteen on Billy Fairchild's unsuitability to retain custody of his daughter.

  But positively the most urgent and desperately annoying problem was that of Eric and Magnus's kidnapping.

  The list of Unseleighe with the power to operate effectively in Manhattan was short—if you defined "effective" not just as the ability to walk around and sight-see—Kory could do that, and he was only a Magus Minor—but to shape-shift, spell-cast, and muster up enough power to take out a fully trained Bard. A few days ago she would have said such a list was nonexistent. Obviously it was not.

  There was the possibility that whoever this was had found allies that had no trouble with Cold Iron. It wasn't unheard of, but the Unseleighe were not noted for their cooperative spirits.

  And why would the Seleighe take him without telling her? Especially after that last time—she'd made her feelings perfectly clear. The chill in her message to Prince Arvin probably kept his drinks cold for a month.

  The first thing she'd done after they'd learned that Eric and Magnus had been taken was to write down as much as she knew and courier it up to Inigo Moonlight in Carbonek. The elven "Confidential Inquiry Agent and Researcher of the Arcane" had far more Underhill contacts than Ria did: if Eric were Underhill—in either Court—Mr. Moonlight would be able to locate him, and, just as important, tell Ria why he and Magnus had been taken.

  Doing that bought her time to think sensibly and carefully. If the kidnapping was a side effect of some annoying Sidhe vendetta, and had nothing to do with Eric personally, the very last thing she wanted to do was tell Elfhame Misthold about it. She'd spent the first few decades of her life listening to her Unseleighe father plot long elaborate schemes and vengeances against a constantly expanding enemies list, and knew exactly how long Sidhe memories could be—and how their quarrels could escalate. Eric had been caught up in one once. Never again. Telling Arvin would only bring Misthold in on the quarrel and make things worse for decades to come.

  She'd also used her own spellcraft to try to locate Eric. Ria was a sorceress: neither an Elven Magus nor a mortal magician, her unique abilities were a peculiar blend of both sides of her mixed-blood heritage. And she'd come up with precisely nothing. Not scrying, not psychometry, not pyromancy—no form of divination or clairvoyance that she tried had revealed either Eric or Magnus's location. True, she wasn't primarily a scryer nor a far-seer; she hadn't the practice in it that specialists did. Nevertheless, the fact that she was drawing a blank bothered her profoundly.

  All that left was a waiting game, and she didn't like it. Maybe Hosea would have better luck than she'd had—he was Eric's apprentice, after all. Maybe there was a link there that he could follow. She'd wait till a slightly more civilized hour and call him. Whether he'd found any traces of the Dark Court beyond the spell he'd detected at Ace's hearing or not, she still wanted the two of them back here where she coul
d keep a closer eye on them. And come to that, something about everything going on down in Atlantic City just didn't add up. . . .

  The phone rang. She glanced down. Her private line, and Kayla's number. She grabbed for it.

  "Ria."

  "Hi, Ria. Don't worry, we're all right."

  She closed her eyes in relief. Dear gods, those were the words she wanted to hear more than any others right now. . . .

  "Eric!"

  "But that's just about all the good news," Eric went on. "First things first: there's a free concert today at the Heavenly Grace Cathedral and Casino of Prayer. Gabriel Horn has set a bomb to go off during the concert. I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in the casino—it's being closed down during the concert—but I'm not sure."

  Trust Eric to show up out of nowhere and present her with a full-blown disaster as casually as other men would offer her a bouquet of flowers.

  Yes, but that means he knows deep down where it counts that you can handle disasters, and you can probably do something about them. There had been men in her life who had taken one look at her and assumed she had gotten where she was by accident.

  "What do you need me to do?" Ria asked simply.

  She heard Eric laugh a little raggedly.

  "None of us here would make the most credible witness—Ace overheard Horn telling Billy about it while she was burgling his office, but Horn told Billy the bomb would be a dud, to whip up support for Billy's White Power Crusade. Horn told us he intends it to be the real thing—but that was while he was holding Ace, Magnus, and me prisoner. That's because Gabriel Horn is Prince Gabrevys ap Ganeliel—Jachiel's father—and he blames me for the fact that his son is at Misthold. Among other things, he wants revenge. Lots of it, probably involving pain, dismemberment, and emotional suffering beforehand."

  Elven vendetta, Ria thought aggrievedly. I knew it. I swear, you'd think that with their long lives they'd have figured out something better to do with their time.

  "But he can't just take out a Bard," she said aloud. Not because she believed it, but because she wanted to figure out how the little bastard had created bonsai out of the treaties and laws that governed Underhill to allow him to take out a Bard.

  By the sound of Eric's long-suffering sigh, she wasn't the first person to have said that to him lately.

  "He can if the Bard's parents set the Bard up by accident," Eric said. "Long story. I'll tell you later. Anyway, nobody's going to believe any of us if we report the bomb, and if the authorities try to check out the warning with Horn or any of his people—and I think he's got a lot of his own people into the Ministry by now—he'll just englamour them and make them go away thinking everything's all right."

  "So you thought of me," Ria said dryly, thinking hard. Surely, with all of this so-called "War on Terror" nonsense, she could find someone, somewhere whose paranoia she could use as a crowbar to lever this mess open, or a hammer to beat it into submission. "When is this bomb supposed to go off?"

  "I think he'll want to go for the biggest mess he can make," Eric said. "The concert's supposed to start at noon, but there were people already there the middle of last night. Oh, and Kayla's here, if you're looking for her—I summoned Lady Day and she, uh, sort of hitched a ride. But that's a good thing, it turns out, because none of our cellphones are working for some reason, and hers is."

  It lacked only that, it really did, Ria thought. She also thought about ordering him to send Kayla right back on Lady Day, reckoned the odds of that actually happening, took a deep breath, and banished the problem of Kayla from her thoughts before she spoke.

  "I'll do everything I can," Ria said. "I wish I could promise, but the two of them—Horn and Fairchild—seem to have their hooks into things pretty deeply down there—and now we know why." Something else occurred to her, as she allowed her head to shift into the twisty paths that the Unseleighe—and, come to think of it, government officials—usually took. "And Eric . . . you do realize that Horn might have known that Ace was listening to the original conversation all along and just lied to Billy, knowing that Ace would overhear it?"

  There was a stunned silence from the other end of the line. No, obviously Eric hadn't considered anything like that. But Eric hadn't grown up as a pawn of Perenor's plots and counterplots.

  "But he told us the same thing when we were his prisoners," Eric said blankly. "It has to be true. And no matter what . . . we can't just ignore it."

  No, we can't. No sane person could. But the Sidhe, especially the Unseleighe Court, aren't sane by any definition of the World Above. Certainly Gabrevys would lie to someone he was preparing to kill. Certainly he'd want to put Ace in the position of having to go to the police with the story that her father was involved in a plot to blow up his own casino. And certainly he'd like to take me out of the game now by making me cry "wolf" in this spectacularly public fashion about something that turns out not to be true. . . . And certainly he is capable of thinking of a hundred plots and counterplots on the spur of the moment. Nothing is too tangled a web for him to weave.

  But we don't dare take the chance he's bluffing. . . .

  "I'll do as much as I can do from here," Ria said. "But this time, Eric . . . I can't make any guarantees." She thought for a moment. "Where are you? Do you want me to send a car for you?"

  She could almost feel him grin, ruefully.

  "Actually, I'm not sure where we are—but I am sure it wouldn't be a good idea for us to stay here long enough for your car to get here. We managed to out-think the Unseleighe so far, but I'm sure Gabrevys has plenty of plain old mortals on his payroll, too. His guys went away when they couldn't get past the Cold Iron box we were hiding in, but they know where they left us. We need to haul ass away from here before they decide to wake up a mortal or three and send them with shotguns. Lady Day can get us back to the Garden State Parkway, and we'll do our best to get back to Atlantic City from there. Maybe there's some place around here we can rent a car."

  "Or steal one." Ria laughed. "Good luck in convincing your elvensteed to become a charabanc. And . . . be careful."

  "I'm always careful," Eric said virtuously.

  Chapter 9:

  Countin' On A Miracle

  "The first thing we have to do is get out of here," Eric said, handing the phone back to Kayla. "What I told Ria was right; it'll take time for Gabrevys's flunkies to get back, roust out mortal thugs, and send them here, but they do know where they left us, and as far as they know, we've got no way to leave in a hurry."

  "We could always walk," Kayla said, regarding Lady Day cynically as she stuffed the phone back into her backpack. "I don't see her turning into a stretch-cycle. And even if she could, we'd kind of attract attention."

  "Can't that thing, um, turn into other things?" Magnus said, surprising Eric. "Besides a bike, I mean." He hadn't thought that Magnus had been paying that much attention to the Otherworldly aspects of Eric's life—willingly or otherwise.

  "Within limits," Eric agreed. "She did a car once, but it was a pretty small car. I'm not really sure she can turn into something big enough to hold five of us."

  "And a dog," Kayla added.

  Molly trotted back over to Lady Day to sniff at her front tire in a speculative fashion. Lady Day responded with a loud engine howl, and flashed her lights menacingly. The pug—not particularly daunted—scuttled backward, barking cheerfully.

  "Whatever she's going to do, could she do it soon?" Ace begged. "Because I don't know how far we are from Atlantic City, but I'm sure you're right. Mr. Horn already knows he's got to send somebody else after us, and they're probably already on their way."

  "C'mon, sweetie," Eric said to the elvensteed. "The five of us really need to get out of here, and you're our only way. Gabrevys isn't going to be happy that we got away from his knights. I need you to turn into something that will carry all of us."

  The moment the words were out of his mouth, he knew he should have been more specific. Lady Day shivered all over, there was a kind of blurring a
round her, and suddenly, in place of the cream-and-red touring bike, there was . . .

  "What's that?" Magnus asked after a long moment. "It looks like a Volkswagen. But . . . not. Um. A whole lot of not. Is there room in it for an engine?"

  "Real impressive, Banyon," Kayla drawled.

  "It's a Citroen," Eric said, inspecting the folding windows. "Just be glad she didn't pick a Reliant Robin." The goggle-eyed red-and-cream car—almost small enough to have fit into the Cadillac's trunk—did vaguely resemble a mutant Volkswagen. Fortunately Lady Day only looked like a Citroen; they wouldn't have to deal with the little French car's notoriously underpowered two-cylinder engine. Since she was still herself, there didn't have to be room for an engine. And with the rag-top down, they could all fit inside. Barely.

  "Pleased with yourself, aren't you?" Eric said to the elvensteed. This was probably her revenge for his telling her to leave him and Magnus with the Unseleighe. But—yes, it could have been worse. She could easily have picked a Reliant Robin.

  Lady Day flashed her headlights in her equivalent of uproarious laughter. Eric sighed inwardly. His fault for not being more specific, but on the other hand, she really couldn't turn into something much larger than this, so there was no point in wishing for something like, say, a Jeep Cherokee. There was a kind of mass limit, apparently—though one or two of the Sun-Descending and Fairgrove Sidhe had elvensteeds that could, and did, reliably replicate real sports cars.

  Maybe it was an available power thing. Maybe it had something to do with seniority. Or rank. Or the fact that he wasn't Sidhe.

  "Pile in, folks," Eric said with a sigh.

  "Shotgun," Kayla said instantly.

  * * *

  They backtracked to the Garden State Parkway South entrance, and headed along it, looking for the nearest exit that would lead them to the northbound Parkway.