by Eileen Wilks
Laban was still searching, too, on the ground. They hadn’t found any more traces of elves. It was a big damn haystack.
If “LT250” wasn’t a partial license plate number, they were wasting an enormous amount of time. Time Lily couldn’t afford. Dammit, dammit, dammit…carefully Rule relaxed the hand he’d tightened into a fist atop his copy of the LT250 license plates. He realized he’d scanned most of the current page on autopilot. He could have missed something.
Damn it to hell. He didn’t want to look at lists. Man and wolf, he wanted to act.
He made himself take a slow breath, rolled his shoulders to loosen them—and winced. His wounded shoulder was not finished healing. Had he been able to sleep to speed the process, it would be almost whole again, but—
“Found something,” Mike said.
Rule beat Bergman to Mike’s side, but only by a hair. She’d been closer, but still, she was fast for a human. “Show me.”
“Here.” Mike pointed at a line halfway down one sheet, then at another sheet. “Abraham Brown. Got it on both sheets. Driver’s license number matches, too.”
Jasper sat up eagerly. “What is it? What’s the address?”
“44191 West Crescent,” Bergman said. “Bill, check the map.”
Jasper slumped. “That’s damn near in the bay.”
“He’s right.” A dark-haired man—Bill, presumably—had jumped up to look at a large map of the city pinned to one wall. “44191 would be right around here.” He tapped on the map with one finger.
Bergman gave Rule a sharp look. “You said she wasn’t near the water.”
Rule moved up to look at the map. The spot Bill had his finger on was very near the bay. It was also west of the hotel. Not all that far from the area where Lily had gone looking for Hugo, in fact.
“A lot of warehouses there,” Bill said. “Good place to stash a hostage. I can find out if that address is a warehouse pretty quick.”
“All right. Yes. Do it.” Rule scrubbed a hand through his hair. Was the match a coincidence? It could be. The list of plates ending in LT250 was long, and they were only guessing it was a partial plate number.
Bill did not jump to do what Rule said. He hesitated, looking at his boss.
“It’s west, not east,” Bergman said. “Either your tip was bad, or we’re looking in the wrong direction.”
Rule had told Bergman the truth—that Lily had contacted him through mindspeech, the kind the dragons used, though he’d only received a few words. Much to his surprise, she’d believed him. She had not, however, told her agents that. As far as they were concerned, Rule had received a mysterious tip they were supposed to treat as golden.
“If this isn’t where they’re holding Lily,” he said slowly, “it could still be connected. Maybe Friar used that identity himself before he gave it to one of the elves. It could lead us to him, if not them. We have to check it out.”
She nodded. “Good point. Come on, Bill—you and I will check out Abraham Brown and 44191 West Crescent. The rest of you keep checking your lists.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, looking at his share of those lists with loathing. “We’ll keep checking.”
THERE was nothing but fire. Fire in the tiny flame flickering at the end of a candlewick. Fire stretching from flame to flame, to the heart of flame.…fire, and Lily’s voice.
Am at 1132 North Bretton. There are two groups of sidhe who are both competing and working together. The halfling has taken me and Sean Friar hostage. She will trade me to Robert Friar. She has two elves with her, capabilities unknown. Robert Friar is with the other group, led by Benessarai. He has Adam King. Location unknown. Capabilities unknown. I am at 1132—
Another voice sliced into her monologue, quick and cutting and as cold as the fire was hot: Not now! Send the ghost.
A door slammed shut.
Lily jolted. Blinked in disbelief.
“What?’ Drummond said urgently. “Did you connect? Did he hear you?”
Drummond had fully materialized again. When had he done that? She’d stopped seeing anything but the candle flame some time ago…how long? The chamber music was long since over. She heard Debussy now, the prelude to his Afternoon of a Faun, and she ached all over. She was exhausted. Limp and drained and exhausted. “I reached him. He shut me out.”
Drummond’s scowl came quickly. “He wouldn’t do that. Maybe I don’t like him, but he’d do anything to get to you. There’s no way he’d shut you out.”
“He…oh.” She realized she was speaking out loud and switched. I wasn’t trying to reach Rule. I did manage that once, but it was so short and I couldn’t tell if anything I sent got through. She wouldn’t let me have the toltoi. I needed the toltoi to contact Rule, so I was trying to reach Sam, the black dragon. And I did. And he shut me out. Lily blinked back tears of exhaustion. Not despair, no. It was just that she was so tired. But she wouldn’t cry because the dragon had been her last hope and he wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t even listen to her.
Drummond came and crouched in front of her. “You can’t give up.”
“I’m not.” She heard how flat her voice sounded, though, and realized she’d forgotten again and spoken out loud.
“Turns out all those assholes who said ‘where there’s life, there’s hope’ were right. Because on this side of the line, you can’t do anything. Not one damn thing. You’re still on the other side of that line. You can do something. Even if it doesn’t work, you can do something. You just have to keep doing something.”
Keep doing something. Yeah, sure, that sounded fine—but what?
She straightened, wincing at how sore her back was. He told me to send the ghost. That would be you. I guess he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. You can’t go to Rule. You can’t get more than a couple hundred feet from me.
Drummond didn’t answer.
I can try to reach Rule again. But even “talking” to Drummond felt draining. She’d about used up whatever resource she drew on for mindspeech.
“You said Turner could see me.”
Yeah, some. But you can’t get to him, so how does that—
The walls quit playing Debussy. Alycithin’s lilting voice replaced the music. “Lily, I regret that I must interrupt your mediation. I have heard from Robert Friar. It is time to make the exchange.”
THEY came for Lily with a gun, the SIG Sauer Al had seen earlier. The elf in jeans carried it. Al wanted to punch him so bad his clenched fists were shaking.
“I wish we had had longer to talk,” the halfling said in her beautiful voice. She held an object very familiar to Al—a set of police-issue restraints. “I enjoyed your company. Please put your hands behind your back so I may secure them.”
“What have you done to Sean?”
The other elf—who looked barely strong enough to carry a large sack of dog food—was toting Sean Friar back into the bedroom they’d just left.
“Only a sleep spell. He will be fine.”
She didn’t deserve this. Lily Yu was bright and brave and resourceful. She was a good cop. One of the best, and he had the years on the job to know what the best looked like. She was what he had been…once.
“Put your hands behind your back, please, Lily.”
“Are you out of drugged darts?”
“Robert Friar does not want you drugged.”
“I guess it would take all the fun out of it for him if I weren’t conscious and shaking with fear. Where are we going?”
The halfling was getting impatient. “To Robert Friar.”
Even before Al killed the bitch who’d killed his Sarah, he’d lost some of that shine. The job took it out of you, and he’d gotten hard, cynical, willing to cut corners. Then he lost Sarah, and he went crazy. Maybe he was still crazy, because he couldn’t regret killing Martha Billings. Not exactly. But he hadn’t given the law a chance. He’d decided his need to kill was bigger and more important than anything else. The law hadn’t failed him. He’d failed it. After that, he’d made
one bad decision after another.
Lily shook her head. “I mean where in the city. If he is in the city. Will this be a long ride or a short one? How much time do I have left?”
She was still trying to get information. He couldn’t see what good that information would do her, but she was doing something. She hadn’t given up.
“It should take twenty minutes or less to get there. He is in an old warehouse not far from where I captured you. If you do not put your hands behind you back now, I will force you. It would be more dignified to comply.”
“I guess I’m not in a dignified mood.”
Sarah hadn’t deserved to die. Neither did Lily Yu, but Al was even more helpless this time. Condemned to watch it happen. Unable to do anything to stop it. He wanted to bang his head against the wall, but his head would go through the goddamn wall.
Alycithin nodded and said something in her language to the jeans-wearing elf. She handed him the restraints.
Yu tried. She had some moves, too, but the halfling—Al had never seen anything like her. She moved as fast as those damn lupi, and she had the whole package—speed, training, strength. It was over pretty quick, ending with Yu on her stomach on the floor, the halfling straddling her, and the other elf fastening the restraints.
He circled the pair of them, useless and furious and willing to do anything. Anything at all, if only there was something he could do.
The black dragon thought there was.
Send the ghost, he’d told her. Well, Al was the only ghost she had. The dragon had to mean him. He circled the two living people as Alycithin pulled Lily to her feet, unable to stop moving. Maybe the dragon was right. Dragons mostly were, when it came to the woo-woo stuff. Maybe there was something Al could do and he was too stupid to see it. Maybe he was as big a failure as a ghost as he had been as a cop and as a husband. If he—
His ankle brushed against something.
He jumped back. Astonished was way too small a word for what he felt. He hadn’t touched anything since he died. He could sort of feel walls and floors and people, but it wasn’t like touching them. It wasn’t the same at all.
Thin and taut, a glowing cord stretched away from Yu, angling slightly down.
That? That’s what he’d felt, the damn cord that ran between her and Turner? It was thinner than ever, as if it had been stretched way out. Tentatively he approached.
Lily’s gaze darted to him. The halfling was behind her, marching her forward. “You will not be noticed,” Alycithin said. “Do not tire yourself calling out or attempting to draw attention in other ways. Dinalaran, the door, please.”
Al reached out and touched the cord—or tried to. His hand went right through it. Disappointment crashed down so hard he could only stand there, staring. But he’d felt it. It had brushed his ankle. Why couldn’t he feel the damn thing now? He reached out with both hands—and his left hand touched it. Felt it. His left hand, where his wedding ring glowed.
The cord was thinner than a rope and slick. He closed his hand around it. His fingers gripped. They gripped and held on.
What…you doing?
Yu’s mental voice was so faint he’d missed a couple of words. He looked at her. “I’m going to try it. Turner can see me. Maybe I can use this to get to him, let him know you’re being taken to a warehouse.”
Use what?
“Whatever this thing is between the two of you. I can hold it. Maybe I can follow it.” Maybe he’d gotten lost in the gray because it didn’t have landmarks. This—this cord thing—maybe it wouldn’t go away. Maybe he could hold on to it, pull himself along it, even when everything else went to gray.
But he’d better hurry. Once the halfling got Yu in a car, he was going to come apart.
“Don’t call me,” he told her urgently. “If you do, I’ll come back, and I need to try this.” He held onto the cord tightly and started running—out the door and right down into the floor.
He felt both door and floor as he passed through them. Not tactilely, the way he felt the cord. Just a vague sense of compression as if whatever he was composed of now reacted to the mass he passed through. He raced through someone’s living room, through a wall and a hallway, and out of the building entirely. He was still nearly two stories above the ground.
The cord felt strong and stable in his hand. It stretched out straight ahead of him as he ran. It didn’t seem to matter that his feet had nothing below them but air. He grinned, exhilarated. He’d never tried this. When he wanted to move fast, he’d always let himself go misty. But mist didn’t have hands, couldn’t hang on to a cord.
This was fun.
His grin faded as he looked ahead and saw the way buildings, people, everything faded. Only a few yards ahead of him now, the world took on a gray cast. Beyond that…nothing. The cord stretched out and out into the nothing.
He kept running. The world had faded to gray, ghostly shapes, barely seen, when the first vibration shook him.
He hadn’t been fast enough. Lily Yu was in a car, and it was speeding up.
He began to tatter quickly, and as he came apart he felt the pull, as if he had a hook set deep in his soul that was yanking him. Pulling him back toward her. He’d only felt a little tug before, not this deep ripping. His hand started to lose the feel of the cord, lose…
No. He focused everything he had, everything he was, on his hand, on the hand gripping the cord. On the gold of the ring he wore, glowing like the cord still glowed. Even here where all was gray, here in the heart of the nothing, his ring glowed faintly, just like the cord. He couldn’t see anything but his hand, his ring, and a short length of the shining cord. Everything around him was gone. He was gone, except for that hand, but he kept moving even as that hook ripped him.
It hurt. It felt like the hook was ripping open the gut he didn’t have anymore.
He focused even harder on his hand, the one part of him that was still real. That would, by God, stay real. And he kept moving away from Lily Yu.
FORTY-ONE
THAT was the last name on his list. Rule had checked every damn one, and found nothing.
He rubbed his face and looked around. Madame Yu and Mike were still bent over their lists, but the rest were through. Now what? What the hell did they do next? “I guess we pass our copies to the person next to us. Double-check each other.”
“We eat now,” Madame Yu said without looking up from her pages.
Eat. Yes, it was…God, it was noon. Friar had had Lily for about twelve hours. Rule closed his eyes and tried not to think of what that meant. She was alive. She was alive, and she’d managed to contact him once. “Of course,” he said, amazed at how level his voice sounded. “Scott, would you order something for us?”
Scott nodded and took out his phone and tapped the man sitting next to him on the shoulder. “I don’t know the takeout around here. Where should I call?”
“There’s a pizza place two blocks over that’s pretty good. I’ll get you the number.”
Rule’s phone sounded. He grabbed it. “Yes?”
“We found something,” Tony said. “Pretty fresh, too. It’s at the Whole Foods in Potrero Hill. Rick’s in the produce section now with his cop. He indicated that the strawberries have a lot of elf-scent.”
“Potrero Hill,” Rule repeated, jotting it down. “The Whole Foods store.” He shoved his chair back.
Bergman came in. “That Crescent Street address is a warehouse. It was leased to Abraham Brown this past November, which is a pretty neat trick, considering he died in May.” She stopped. “You found something?”
“Not on the lists. One of my people found elf-scent at a Whole Foods store in Potrero Hill.” Wherever the hell that was. He’d been so eager to move that he hadn’t asked. “Do you know where that is?”
“Sure.” The way her eyes brightened said she was eager to get moving, too. “I’ll take you.” She stuck her head back out in the hall. “Bill! I’m going with Turner to check out another lead. Get out to that warehouse, see
if there’s a watchman or someone you can talk to.”
“Can we get a copy of the picture on Abraham Brown’s license?” Rule asked. “Maybe the elves used that likeness for their illusion. Maybe someone will recognize it.”
“Good thinking,” Bergman said. “Harris, you’re quick with that sort of thing.”
“Sure, pick on the new guy.” But the young man stood, stretched, and hurried out of the room.
“I will come with you,” Madame Yu said, and stood.
Beth popped out of her chair. “Me, too.”
Bergman shook her head at both of them. “I need people who can take it door-to-door if we get a hit on Brown’s photo. I don’t need civilians.”
Rule saw the hand first. About three feet away, emerging from the wall next to Bergman—a clear, distinct hand. A man’s hand with a glowing gold wedding band on one finger. It was gripping something tightly. Behind it…mist. Only mist.
“Rule.” Madame Yu’s voice was quiet. Worried. She’d moved up to stand beside him. “What is it?”
“Drummond,” he whispered.
The moment he used the man’s name, the mist began shaping itself. It assembled slowly, painfully slowly, but at last Al Drummond stood there in front of Rule.
He looked bad. He’d been dead for three months, but now he looked like he was dying, and dying in agony. His face was grooved deeply by pain. The tendons in his neck stood out. He seemed to be fighting to stand upright. He looked at Rule and said something.
“I can’t hear you. I can see you, but I can’t hear you. Where’s Lily? Is she nearby?’ he asked sharply.
Drummond shook his head and shuddered. Again he said something. Rule watched his mouth carefully, but he’d never learned to lip-read. “Again,” Rule said. “Say it again, slowly.”
It was no good. He shook his head. “I can’t understand you. Dammit to hell!”
“Who can’t you understand?” Bergman asked warily.
“Quiet,” Madame snapped. “Rule, the ghost tied to Lily is here and trying to tell you something?”