by Rene Sears
Did this mean Morgan had made it back to Strangehold? How did Lunn know?
I owe her a boon, that if she needs me, I will hear her. The call is faint. Lunn whined out loud. Something's wrong. I don't know where she is.
"I want to," I said out loud, for Teo. "But there's something I have to do first."
He nodded. "And whatever it is has to do with this hada dog you've got? Is it your familiar?"
I just gaped at him, while Lunn growled.
"I'm not an idiot, Javier," he added.
I shook myself. This wasn't the weirdest thing that had happened all day. I had a brother. "Some friends of mine are in trouble. I want to help."
Teo nodded slowly. "Then I want to help too." He caught my incredulous look. "Hey, a friend of yours is a friend of mine. Besides, it'll get us home faster." It sent another jolt through me, hearing him say "home" so casually, as if where I belonged was with him. I wasn't sure I did. Vicente had kept us apart, had treated my—our mother like she wasn't in charge of her own life. But I wanted to know Teo.
I took a breath. He had said he'd help. I didn't have to decide anything right this second. Morgan needed us.
I turned to Lunn. "Where do we need to go?"
*
"Come on," Teo said. "Get in the car."
Lunn leaned back and whined.
"Oh, come on," I said. "This'll get us to Morgan."
Lunn rolled one big eye back toward me. His glamour might have been slipping, because red shone through the brown.
"Come on, Lunn. You can do it. I bet you used to ride in the car all the time before you—" I glanced at my brother, who lifted an eyebrow. "Changed. Hung your head out the window and everything. Right?"
I did not mind metal then.
"Come on. I bet this thing's mostly plastic anyway."
His eyes rolled again, but he reluctantly heaved himself into the back, throwing himself dramatically on the leather bench seat. After a second he buried his nose in his paws. You're right. It's not so bad.
"He says it's all right," I relayed to Teo without thinking.
This time both eyebrows went up. "He says? You can talk to him?"
I shut the door, mindful of Lunn's paws, wishing I had been mindful of my mouth. "Well, I can hear him. I guess not everyone can. He understands both of us, though."
"Interesting. Yeah, you're right—most people aren't that sensitive. That's good to know." He popped open the driver's door and slid in while I walked around to the passenger door. I didn't like the way he said that—I could imagine him putting together a report for our great uncle. Sensitive to the fae. Can whip up a good ward.
I got in the car and buckled in while Teo brought it rumbling to life with the push of a button. "So—you said he changed. The dog."
My shoulders wanted to inch up to my ears. I tried to relax. "I don't know all the details. He used to be a normal dog and then something happened to make him a—whatever he is now."
"A fae dog." Teo backed up the car then threw it into drive and headed toward the highway. "So where am I taking us?"
Good question. Luckily one that being a caster made it easier to answer. But still—"Let's try this the easy way first," I said. "Do you have a phone?" Mine was back at Strangehold.
Teo nodded and pulled a smartphone from his pocket and tossed it to me. I found the crumpled piece of paper on which Morgan had scrawled her and Anil's phone numbers. It seemed like a long time ago, but it was only a couple of days. I tapped in the number and hit send, and a few moments later it was ringing. Someone picked up on the fourth ring and I heard a faint "Hello?" through scratchy feedback of some kind.
"Morgan?" Man, it would be great if it was that easy.
"No," said a voice I recognized but couldn't place. "This is Hawthorn. Is this Javier?"
"Yes." I frowned at the air. Hawthorn hadn't seemed like an electronics kind of lady. "Is Morgan there? I'm calling from...outside. You get cell phone reception?"
"No, but Rose is boosting the signal for me. None of you have returned yet." My heart dropped into my stomach. They'd all left Faerie before me, and Rowan and the twins had left before my spell had disrupted the gate.
"I think Morgan's in trouble. I think she needs help." Lunn whined agreement from the backseat. "I'm going to try to find her."
"I'll help," Hawthorn said immediately. "Come to Strangehold."
"I don't know how. And I have some—" I couldn't help but glance at my brother. "I have company with me." He smiled.
"Well, then." Hawthorn took a breath I heard even over the bad connection. "In that case I will come to you. Can you find your way to Morgan's house?"
"I think so."
"Do you have the one of the Finding discs?"
"Yes."
"In that case, it will get brighter as you get closer. I'll meet you there."
"Thank you—" She had already hung up. Phone etiquette probably wasn't all that high on the list of things fae learned, come to think of it.
Teo looked at me. "Another friend?"
"Yes." I wasn't sure what—or whether—to tell him about Strangehold or Hawthorn. "At least, she's ready to help. So, where are we?"
Teo's eyebrows shot up. "You don't know?" But he was already reaching for the map button on the expansive dash.
"To be honest, we had kind of a run-in with the fae. In, uh, Faerie." I wished I could dash off a casual "underhill" or "the Court" the way the twins had, but I just couldn't make myself.
"Damn, Javier. You're full of surprises." The map flickered into existence on the screen in front of me, the lines of highways and side roads popping into existence, as well as a big green blotch indicating the forest Lunn and I had trudged through.
We were actually...not very far from where Morgan had picked me up. I wondered if the gate sent people back to places they had been before without other information. I hoped that Morgan had been as fortunate.
I remembered the exit Morgan had taken to her house. It was only a few miles west. "It's not too far once we get off the highway," I told Teo.
"We'll figure it out," he said. "So....what have you been doing the last few months?"
I chewed the inside of my cheek. What to say? I didn't want to get my aunt in trouble. "Moving around," was what I settled on. "Trying to find other casters." It seemed early yet to tell him about the hellhound that had chased me in Atlanta. But on the other hand...I had a source now. I reminded myself to ask Lunn about the hunt when I got a chance. At Morgan's house, it could have been after either me or the twins, but the hound in Atlanta was clearly looking for me. But now wasn't the time.
Teo glanced at me. I thought I saw sympathy in his eyes before he looked back to the road. "All by yourself?"
"Yeah, pretty much."
He shook his head. "You don't have to worry about that anymore. We'll take care of you. You won't be alone again." It was all I'd wanted to hear since my parents died, and yet it terrified me. I swallowed past a knot in my throat.
The sign for the exit to Morgan's house came up and I told Teo to take it. I pulled the glass disc from my pocket. A spark of light floated above it, and we followed it more than my memory—it had been raining hard and I had been cold and tired the last time I'd come this way. We took a few wrong turns and had to circle back, but we got there in the end.
Teo lifted an eyebrow as he took in the smallish house with the peeling paint, but he didn't say anything. The engine ticked as it cooled, and Lunn flung himself out of the car, shaking vigorously like he was knocking off water.
"This way." I led them toward the bridge over the creek rather than to the house. A tall thin figure in the trees resolved into Hawthorn, waiting for us. She had glamoured herself into a passable human, though still angular and ethereal and lovely, and wearing a dress even I could tell was nearly a half-century out of date. I waved a hand at her, and she waved back, but then her spine stiffened as Lunn barked.
He dashed forward, growling, and she said, very firmly, "Si
t!"
Lunn did. He didn't look as though he meant to; his hindquarters fetched up under him before his forelegs had quite stopped moving. I felt a mental conversation between them more than heard it. Teo shot me a look. I shrugged. Lunn dropped so he was lying on the ground and wagged his tail.
"Hawthorn, this is Teo. I guess you've already met Lunn."
Hawthorn smiled, and Lunn said, She is not like the fae of underhill.
"Indeed," Hawthorn said, whether to me or Lunn, I wasn't sure. "Teo, Jane Hawthorn."
Teo sent another weighted look my way, but he extended his hand to Hawthorn, who looked at it for a long moment before reaching out to shake it.
"It's okay," I said. "He's also a caster, and he wants to help." I paused, but—why not? I was so used to keeping secrets, but I didn't actually have to. What would Hawthorn care? "He's my brother."
"Delighted to meet you." Hawthorn—Jane? Really?—shot Teo a million-watt smile, and he returned one just as bright.
"Ms. Hawthorn. The pleasure is all mine."
"So no one ever came back?" I said, since it looked like they weren't going to stop out-politing each other.
Hawthorn tapped elegantly manicured nails against her leg. "No. Morgan was able to reach Rose with a spell, but it was very faint and she couldn't actually tell us where she was. Rose said...it seemed like she thought Rowan and the girls ought already have reached us."
"They went through the gate before we did," I said, unable to keep the tension from my voice.
"Rowan 's an old hand at gates, whether the girls were able or not." Hawthorn frowned.
"Gates," Teo said, a little disbelievingly. "How did you get mixed up in all this fae shit, Javier? I thought our father—"
"Disapproved," I said hastily. Did Hawthorn know who Matthew March was? I didn't want to find out. Now was not the time to reveal that I was the son—that we were the sons—of the man who tried to kill a fae prince and then engineered a plague aimed at taking out most of Faerie. "Yes, he did. But I'm not him."
Teo laughed. "Gran Tío will be happy to hear it. He isn't above making a fae bargain every once in a while."
"Indeed," Hawthorn said drily.
"The girls and Rowan were fine last I saw them, just running," I said before we could go any further astray. "But Morgan was hurt. I don't know how bad."
Hawthorn pulled a phone from a pocket sewn along the seam of her dress and held it out to me. "Rose said to tell you this is Morgan's, and you can use it to find her."
The phone was reassuringly solid in my hand. I had been planning to try to use the paper Morgan had given me with her number if the glass disc itself didn't work, but this was better. She would have carried her phone with her, so it would have a lot more of her personal energy in it. Even non-casters had a low level of energy that saturated their effects, and the more often a person handled an object, the more of them it would retain. Jewelry, watches, and phones were ideal. A piece of paper Morgan had handled once was pretty crap as a focus for this sort of thing, but if I'd had to use it I would have tried, or overcome my misgivings and broken into her house to get something more personal.
"Want an assist?" Teo crossed his arms over his chest as he looked at the phone.
"I think I've got this, but thanks." Teo might be talented, he might have had the advantage of growing up in a powerful magic family, but he had missed out on one thing I'd had: our father's tutelage. I couldn’t claim I had a lot of experience with other casters, but my father's style of casting had been distinctive enough that Morgan had recognized it—and didn't I have a lot to ask her about that. I desperately hoped she was okay and I'd get to. He and our mother had always implied that he was a gifted caster, but a sudden worm of doubt wriggled in my stomach. He'd been wrong about the fae; was he wrong about this?
I cast away my misgivings as best as I could; casting was so much in the head, it didn't do to let in disbelief. I summoned the memory of my father's impenetrable self confidence and pulled it around me like a cloak as I summoned my spellsight.
Morgan' energy was a faint overlay over the phone. It was as silver as any of the leylines that veiled the rest of the world, but tinted with something like a flavor that was unique to Morgan. Wherever she was—and especially if she had cast—that flavor would swirl faintly through the web of leylines. The best way to find it was to knot energy into "spiders" that would crawl through the ley.
None of it was real, of course—it was all metaphor. But the way my mother would have showed me how to cast it was metaphor on top of metaphor, whereas the knot cut out a layer. When I used the smoke to find help—to find Morgan—I was shaping my intention and the ley energy into thin threads that would search down the ley for what I needed, even if I didn't know what it was myself. It was, by its nature, a slow and difficult to trace spell, ephemeral. My "spiders" would move faster, with more intention, and they were also splashier and more noticeable. But I doubted anyone would be looking for this sort of spell, and even if they were, it would be worth it to find Morgan.
I pulled energy from the ley and knotted my spiders into existence. They skittered off, questing for Morgan's energy. There were traces of it all around—the wards in the house, various spells around her property—but I dismissed those as my spiders encountered them and set them looking for the source of her energy. They followed the ley, quick as electricity, quick as thought, then slid sideways, off to a place unreachable through ordinary means. I could feel them only faintly. My heart sank. "I think she's still in Faerie."
"Cool." Teo rolled his shoulders. "I've never been to the other world. How do we get there?"
*
It wasn't as easy as that. Hawthorn reminded us that humans were unwelcome in Faerie at the moment, and that we couldn't just blithely gate in with no risk of consequence. "But," she added, "there are a few back ways that I know of. I'll go and find her and bring her back. There's no need for you to come."
"Can you find her?" I tapped Morgan's phone. "I can't exactly tell you where she is—I'll have to follow the spell as we go."
Haethorn frowned and touched the pendant at her neck, a stone rose. "No," she said reluctantly. "No, I can't. But that doesn't mean your brother has to come with us."
Teo looked up from his phone, where he was swiping out a text message. "Ah ha ha, no. I just found him, lady; I'm not letting him out of my sight. Besides, I meant it—I haven't been to Faerie. I'd kick myself forever for passing up the chance."
Morgan needs us, Lunn said—to me or to Hawthorn or both.
Hawthorn sighed and popped her knuckles. "Fine. Let us all hope we escape unscathed enough for me to tell you I told you so." She pulled a baroque silver lighter out of her pocket. This was no Bic—it was heavily encrusted with flowers and sparkled with tiny jewels set in the petals. She led us to the arch set in the side of the bridge. She flicked the lighter. Instead of a flame, the silver sheen of the gate flickered into existence. She tapped the lighter again and the silver roiled, a ripple like mercury scrolling shuddering across the surface, leaving it darker than it had been, tarnished. Little waves of light and dark crawled across the surface. I bit my lip.
"Is it supposed to look like that?" Teo asked.
She nodded decisively, but there was a definite furrow between her brows. "The problem is not with the gate. The problem is with Faerie." I thought of the thin-stretched landscapes we'd seen on our last visit, the twisted wrong places.
"Come on," Hawthorn said. "It won't get any better for us looking at it." Lunn barked and bounded through the gate, which flashed silver as he did. Hawthorn wasn't exactly tapping her foot, but Teo and I looked at each other. He shrugged, and we stepped through together.
The gate felt like it had looked—waves of ragged magic pushed against me, hot and cold, hostile, until I stepped through. To my vast relief after the last time I'd taken a gate anywhere, Teo was still with me. We stumbled forward, almost into Lunn, and Hawthorn followed an instant later, cool and polished as alway
s.
Lunn's glamour melted away, and he was revealed in all his huge, slavering, red-eyed glory. Teo swallowed visibly, but then he looked at me and smiled. "Your dog's bigger than I thought."
Hawthorn chewed on her thumb as she looked at us. "We can't wander around looking like humans, in case someone sees us. We'll try to stick to the back ways, but still."
I looked around. We were on a gravel path. Weeds infiltrated the pebbles between stands of forest and underbrush. Shadows lay off-kilter across the trail. In the distance, a bird called, but around us all was quiet, not even insects buzzing.
Hawthorn brushed her fingers together and a whirl of energy settled around me and Teo and Hawthorn as well, wrapping us in a weave of magic that pressed against my skin. Hawthorn looked different—like her usual appearance, but not quite; no longer all silvers and violets, her coloration was greens and golds. I couldn't see my own face, but Teo was a strange fae version of himself, taller and thinner as though he'd been stretched out, and his clothes were like something out of a movie. His eyes widened as he took me in.
"The back ways," Hawthorn said, nodding as she took in her work, "and quickly. This will be enough to divert casual attention, but I wouldn’t want to put us under too much scrutiny." She shook her head. "All right, Javier; let's follow your spell."
The net of energy seeking Morgan was still ongoing—I hadn't stopped casting my spell, and the transition through the gate hadn't disrupted it as I'd half-thought it might. I followed the strand of energy. It was different, here. Instead of lines of energy, there was a gentle wash of magic all around us. That didn't stop me from following the line of Morgan's "scent," like a current through a larger body of water.
"That way." I pointed. We were closer than we had been overhill, but I couldn't tell exactly how much.
Hawthorn frowned the way I'd pointed and pursed her lips. "Well. We shall see."
"What is it?" Teo asked.
"I don't know whose lands those are." But she started walking anyway, following the path, Teo and I behind her. Every once in a while Hawthorn would pause and do something—I couldn’t tell what, exactly, but magic moved around her—and the patch would curve a little differently, so that were always moving through the trees toward Morgan. She caught me looking. "I'm stitching together pieces of other paths into one that we can use. Don't worry, they'll go back when I'm done." She smiled. "Not much here has a fixed place, anyway."