by Z. J. Cannon
“Most of those are out of date,” Ellison said with a shrug. “They’re the ones who helped us track down our first experimental subjects—the fae who went into hiding on this side of the veil when Faerie closed itself off from our world. Now that we’ve used all those up, none of these people are much use to us anymore. You’re welcome to pay a few of them a visit, though, if you’ve got your heart set on vengeance.”
I scanned the list of names. None of that meant anything to me. “And you’re just going to give this all to me, when I only asked for Engstrom? Why?” His unwarranted generosity was gnawing at me. If he had meant what he had said about his lofty visions of saving the world, why would he turn around and hand over the keys to his kingdom with nothing more than a shrug?
On the other hand, it wasn’t as if I really believed any of that saving-the-world nonsense had been the truth.
“Sure, you started off asking for Engstrom’s location.” Ellison didn’t bother trying for nonchalance anymore. “But we both know you won’t stop there. It’s like I told you—I have a healthy amount of self-interest. And my assistant isn’t the only one who’s seen some disturbing pictures. I’ve gotten a look at the labs you’ve torn apart. And what was left of our Hawthorne headquarters after you got done with it.” He tried for his smirk again. It collapsed halfway through. He shook his head with a low chuckle. “Call me a coward, if you want. But I prefer not to draw things out.”
“You aren’t going to bother asking me to let you go?” I scrolled down the list of names, looking for a Charles Engstrom.
“Come on, now. If I were in your place, I know what I would do.” He craned his neck to stare up at me. “On the other hand, if you really want to prove you’re so different from me, now’s your chance. Take the files and let me walk out of here.”
I scoffed. “Nice try.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Ellison closed the list of contacts. “You won’t find Engstrom in there. If you want to know where to look for him, start here.” He pointed the cursor at a folder near the bottom, simply labeled Island.
I reached for the mouse. He knocked my hand away. “Not so fast. I’m giving you the key to destroying everything I’ve built. You could at least do me the courtesy of not making me watch you do it.” He reached for the top drawer of his desk.
I held the drawer shut. “I knew you would try something sooner or later.” I angled myself between him and the drawer, and slowly eased it open myself, ready to snatch up whatever weapon was inside.
But where I expected to find a gun, I saw… nothing. Just an assortment of fancy pens, a highlighter, and a couple of flash drives.
He shot me the same contemptuous look he had given me a moment ago. “Do you really think I’m stupid enough to go up against someone who’s spent the past few centuries taking down fae assassins? On second thought, maybe you had better not answer that. I’m not sure my ego could take it.” He laughed—a hollow sound. “Well, if you don’t trust me not to stab you with a pen, hand me that flash drive, will you? The one marked ‘blank.’ You do want a way to carry all this out with you, don’t you?”
I eyed the drive, waiting for the trick. But it looked like any other flash drive. And when I touched it, my fingers didn’t tingle from any contact poisons.
At that thought, I had to laugh at myself. Poisoned flash drives. What was I thinking? Maybe the truth really was as simple as it looked. Maybe Eddie Ellison was just an eloquent coward.
I handed him the drive. He plugged it into the side of the desk. Then he pushed his chair back and stood up.
“Going somewhere?” I watched his hands carefully, and positioned myself between him and the door.
But all he did was take a couple of steps to the windows behind the desk and crank one open. It opened further than I would have expected from a building this high. And there were no screens. I supposed at a certain level of wealth, no one dared lecture you about safety precautions. Or maybe whoever had built this place had secretly hoped he would fall. I took a step back, just in case he was thinking about shoving me through.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and smiled. A real smile, this time. “There, isn’t that better? It was feeling a little stuffy in here. I suppose impending doom will do that to you.” This time his laugh was less forced.
Maybe his sudden lightness was what set my nerves on sudden alert. But I didn’t think it was just that. Something else was wrong here, something besides the smile on his face and how easily he had folded. Something I couldn’t quite—
And then I had it. He had put the flash drive in his computer. Then he had stood up and opened the window. But he had never started copying the files over.
I lunged for the desk just as the screen went black. The innards of the desk let out a low, grinding whine. The screen on top shattered, spewing sparks into the air. The room filled with the smell of scorched plastic.
When I turned back to Ellison, he already had one leg out the window. I grabbed him by the wrists. He fought, flinging himself back so hard his head slammed against the glass. It cracked, but didn’t shatter.
For the first time since I had walked into the room, real panic crossed his face.
I looked down—and immediately wished I hadn’t. The cars down below were the size of pebbles. The people were specks of dust. As I grappled with Ellison, hauling him toward me as hard as I could, I scanned the side of the building for some sort of escape mechanism I had missed—a ladder, a hidden door. I didn’t see anything.
Which meant he wasn’t planning on escaping.
Ellison head-butted my chest, making me take a step back and loosening my grip enough that my hands slid down to his palms. I tightened my fingers, but his sweaty hands were slowly sliding out of my grip. His sweat was slick against my fingers.
“What did Engstrom threaten you with?” I grunted, out of breath. “Why would you die for him?”
Ellison threw his other leg over the side. Now my weakening grip was the only thing between him and a long, hard fall to the pavement.
The fear on his face faded. He smiled.
“I told you,” he said. “We’re saving the world.”
He braced both feet against the building and launched himself backward.
His hands slipped out of mine. Silently, without so much as a gasp, he dropped.
I fumbled with the clasp of JD’s watch and flung the ostentatious thing to the floor. If my magic manifested as wind again, it could stop his fall.
But when had my magic ever been that helpful?
Sometimes, usually when I least wanted it to, it raced through my veins and out of my body before the watch could hit the floor. This time, it was still cautiously creeping out from my core when I saw Ellison land.
I watched for a moment, fists clenched. Just long enough to verify that he wasn’t going to get up. He hadn’t had some last-minute escape plan up his sleeve. This had been his plan, once he had known his attempt at recruitment wouldn’t work and no one was going to answer his panic button. Destroy the data, and the brain that held it.
Now, too late, my magic surged to life. Something fragile and expensive leapt off Ellison’s bookshelf and exploded to the floor in a shower of blue shards before I could properly see what it had been. The TV rattled, threatening to join it.
I fastened the watch around my wrist again as quickly as I could. As much satisfaction as it would have given me to destroy this place the way I had his apartment, I didn’t have that luxury. With Ellison’s computer fried, and Ellison himself a smear on the pavement, this office was the only chance I had of finding some clue to Engstrom’s location. And if I hadn’t been sure Engstrom was the key to all this before, I was now.
Ellison could have made a desperate last stand if he had wanted to. He could have stabbed me with one of those pens and prayed the metal would be enough to shut down my magic. But he had chosen to safeguard Engstrom’s location rather than try to save his own life.
Ellison had never
been the important one here.
I had minutes, at most, before the office would be swarming with cops. However extraordinary Ellison’s assistant was, there was only so much she could do to keep the authorities away now that her boss was lying dead in front of the building. I scanned the desk and its drawers, tossing items to the floor in my haste. The computer was toast—literally. If the sparks and acrid smell hadn’t been enough of a clue, the nasty blister that rose on my finger as soon as I touched the hot remains of the screen would have clinched it. I couldn’t find a phone—Ellison had probably had it on him, which meant it was currently in the same condition as its owner. There was nothing useful in any of the drawers. Even the one that was locked yielded only legal documents for various Nexegence divisions. Nothing that so much as alluded to Arkanica or Engstrom.
Outside, a crowd was gathering around Ellison’s body. Sirens howled in the distance.
I had to get out of here now, or I wouldn’t get out at all.
I spun in a slow circle, scanning the office and trying to shut out the voice that told me it was already too late—Ellison had taken all the clues to finding Engstrom with him. There had to be something. I couldn’t have come this far only to hit a dead end.
Where would he have hidden something? My gaze landed on the bookshelf. Ellison hadn’t struck me as much of a reader. Maybe he had used the books as camouflage for something he cared about more. But the books on the shelf didn’t look like anything more than standard props meant to impress visitors with his intellectual prowess. Shakespeare. Chaucer. The Great Gatsby. And… I squinted, and took a step closer. What was that sandwiched between Moby Dick and Twelfth Night? A slim paperback titled Legends of the Fae Lands. It didn’t look like it belonged among all these thick hardcovers with school-reading-list titles.
I took out the book and open to the title page. It was written by Rina Ashante, PhD. But the name didn’t mean anything to me. I was more interested in the handwritten inscription underneath. Study up, it read. C and I won’t do all the heavy lifting for you forever. Followed by a winking face. It was signed, Rina.
C. Charles, as in Charles Engstrom? It wasn’t exactly an address. But maybe it was a clue.
And it was the best I was going to get. The sirens were already close enough to pierce my eardrums.
With the book in hand, I ran. I hoped Ellison’s assistant had enough tricks left in her to get me out of the building undetected.
Chapter 23
It didn’t take me long to track Ashante down. She was teaching at a little school called Wildwood College, heading up their almost-nonexistent mythology department, which looked like it had about a dozen students enrolled at any given time. At most.
The more I looked through her credentials, the more confused I got. She had gone into this field late, a sharp left turn from her former career as a law professor at Texas A&M. But that hadn’t stopped her from amassing a jaw-dropping array of publications. It looked like she spoke at several conferences every year, and while I wasn’t sufficiently plugged into the academic world to recognize the names of any of them, the accolades attached to her name were plain enough to understand. “The world’s foremost expert in faerie mythology” was one of the more restrained phrases I saw.
Granted, I didn’t have much of a clue how the academic world worked. But I would have bet this woman could have had her pick of positions. And yet she had chosen to head up an obscure department at an even more obscure school. There had to be a story there.
Maybe it was a simple as not liking the public eye. More likely, though, she had certain things in her life she didn’t want coming to light, things that might become public if she didn’t court anonymity wherever possible. Things like her involvement with Arkanica—whatever her connection to them was.
Or maybe her choice of employer had more to do with location. When I looked up the school, I wasn’t surprised to see that it was less than half an hour away from Hawthorne.
I arrived at the sleepy wooded campus the next afternoon. I thought about sitting in on a couple of her classes, just to see whether she knew as much about the fae as the people running those conferences seemed to think she did. But with her department as small as it was, I had the feeling a new face would draw too much attention, even if I sat all the way in the back with a baseball cap pulled low over my eyes. Besides, baseball caps had never been my style.
Instead, I killed time until her last scheduled class was done. Then I watched through the window of her small, cluttered office as she first met with a couple of students, then sat hunched over her laptop, typing, until long after sunset. She only stopped to order herself a salad, which she nibbled at between paragraphs over the course of an hour. Finally, just when I had begun to resign myself to the prospect of sleeping outside her office, she packed up her computer and walked out of the building.
I followed from a safe distance, keeping to the shadows. Even so, she seemed to sense something was wrong. She took small, quick steps, head hunched, glancing over her shoulder every few feet. When she left the shadowy path to turn onto the main road, she stopped for a long time, looking in all directions. I crouched behind a nearby tree and held my breath.
After a few tense moments, she kept going. I trailed her from further back this time. It wasn’t as if I was likely to lose her on this old-fashioned main street without a single other person coming or going in either direction. This wasn’t the kind of place I thought of when I imagined a college town. Around here, a lively party probably meant three people getting together at the town’s one bar.
Ashante turned onto a winding narrow road. We passed several dirt driveways before she stopped at one. She checked the mail, looked over her shoulder one last time, then hurried up the overgrown brick walkway to what looked for all the world like an old-fashioned log cabin.
At least, it did at first glance. My first clue that the house was more than it appeared was when she retracted a square chunk of wood next to the door and stared into what looked like a retinal scanner. It beeped softly, flashed green, and swung the door open without her having to touch it. I wasn’t surprised when, before she slid the false panel back into place, I caught sight of the Nexegence logo on the scanner.
I stayed in the shadows for another few minutes, just in case she decided to come back out. Then I risked walking up to take a closer look, doing my best to stay out of the line of sight of the security cameras I had seen in the corners. The house, as it turned out, wasn’t wood at all, but a very good imitation. There was steel in its construction, too—mostly below the foundation, which was odd, but there was also more in the main body of the house than there should have been if it was the log cabin it looked like. And the aged look was nothing more than decoration. No weather damage, no minor signs of wear—from the shape the place was in, my guess was that it couldn’t have been more than five years old, maximum.
Ashante had money, then. And however in demand she was as a speaker, I highly doubted her public career had made her rich enough to afford to build this place and kit it out with the latest technology. A paycheck from Eddie Ellison would have, though. Not that I had needed more evidence that she was involved with Arkanica—the book on Ellison’s shelves had been more than enough.
I had flipped through that book while waiting for her to be done with her classes. I had wanted to know how much genuine information she had. The answer seemed to be: a lot. More than your average human, that was for certain. Granted, my own knowledge was hardly encyclopedic. It wasn’t as if the assassins I had faced had ever stopped to discuss fae history before trying to kill me. But I knew enough to recognize that she understood some things most humans didn’t. The way Faerie echoed the human world, for example—how its landscape changed to reflect the ways the humans used their own land, from the monuments they erected to the battles they fought. The book had even mentioned, in passing, how fae magic used to be far more powerful in the days when Oberon was young, before it had weakened and split into the f
our elements. I had never seen a human mention that before, no matter how knowledgeable.
And the book talked about me. That was the part that made my skin crawl. She had only devoted a couple of paragraphs to me, but that was more than enough. Ciarán, the half-fae protector of humanity, doomed to be forever hunted by his own kind—meaning the fae, although I could have told her I had no desire to be seen as one of them. The humans had a saying—although it had gone out of fashion lately—about feeling like a goose had walked over one’s grave. I had never really understood what it meant until I saw my name in that book.
I circled the house, still avoiding the cameras as best I could. The back windows looked easy enough to slip in through, but I wasn’t fooled. No one put a retinal scanner by their front door and then left the windows unlocked. And even if I did make it inside, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to hear the voice of my old friend OmniSafe by Nexegence, the world’s most advanced home security system.
I returned to the front door and eyed it with growing irritation. The way I saw it, I had two options. Wait out here tonight, sleep with pine needles poking into my back, and have my talk with her once she left the house tomorrow morning. Or go for the direct approach, and knock on her front—
“Are you going to keep me waiting much longer?” came a soft voice from a speaker I couldn’t see. “I’d rather you didn’t. It’s awfully hard on my nerves.”
Oh. Or that.
“Can we go ahead and get this over with?” Ashante continued. “I know why you’re here, and I’m willing to talk. Is there enough fae in you to be interested in making a deal?”
I stepped out onto the walkway, no longer concerned about the cameras. “That depends. What are you offering?” I scanned every window I could see, but all the shades were pulled down. I didn’t like that she could see me but I couldn’t see her. It made me feel like the target in a shooting gallery. I focused on the weight of JD’s watch on my wrist and tried not to let my own nerves show.