Faerie Rising: The First Book of Binding (The Books of Binding 1)

by A. E. Lowan

  The doors opened and Jonathan headed briskly towards his security department. His security chief, a hulking behemoth of a man, waited just inside for him. “Right this way, sir,” he said with a reverent nod, bowing him past the receptionist and into the viewing room. Jonathan followed. He hired the best and trusted them to do their jobs but he was also a micro-manager at heart. Aodhán followed behind, watching people instantly look busier as Jonathan approached, and hid his amusement.

  The viewing room had a single image on the large central monitor – a breathtaking young man sitting astride the back seat of a motorcycle in the coffee shop parking lot across the street. Aodhán let the security chief pull out two chairs for them and then waved the man out. The chief closed the door behind him.

  Aodhán noted that Jonathan remained standing, transfixed on the monitor, and kept his feet. “My question is,” he said, watching Jonathan’s profile, “since when did sidhe we did not recruit start coming to Seahaven?”

  Jonathan kept staring, eyes wide. He remained silent.

  Aodhán watched him for several long minutes. Finally, he could no longer stand the silence. “My lord Midir,” he probed. In private he could be more formal with the great prince. “What is attracting them? Do you think they sense the-”

  Midir turned his face towards Aodhán, but his eyes stayed on the image. “Is the boy alone?”

  Aodhán’s eyes narrowed slightly with suspicion. What did Prince Midir know that he did not? Volumes, he was certain. “No.” He took up the remote and hit fast forward on the video, until a man in a groundskeeper’s uniform came running up to the bike. The hat obscured his features, given the high angle of the camera, even as he drove towards the guards rushing towards them, and by the time it was blown off he was at such an angle the camera could not get a good visual of his face. “The boy’s rescuer. The license plate came back registered to a man in Kentucky. Security is looking into it as we speak. We have video of him inside the building as well,” he said as he brought up a second monitor and showed Jonathan a back hallway. “Here we get a much better look at him.” The man walked across the monitor following a woman from Accounts Receivable. Aodhán had already contacted her supervisor about disciplining her. He let the video play until it reached the clearest view of the man’s face, and then paused to watch Midir’s reaction.

  The great prince leaned forward, peering closely at the still, his face quizzical. “Now who do we have here?” he said quietly.

  “And why does he look like Senán?” Aodhán asked in return.

  Midir’s eyes widened in recognition and he jerked back, features twisted in rage. He shook for a moment, and finally spat viciously, “Summer’s Get.”

  Who? “I beg your pardon, my lord?” Aodhán asked quietly.

  Midir looked at him, turned back to the monitors, and sneered. He then turned back to Aodhán, shook his head, and stalked out of the viewing room.

  Aodhán watched him leave, questions tumbling in his mind. Summer’s Get? Who was that? He had been five centuries exiled from Faerie – the name meant nothing to him. But, watching the way Midir reacted, it made him wonder…

  How could this Summer’s Get be put to use?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Etienne paid for their lunch with the last of their cash and joined Cian at the picnic table he held in reserve for them. The boy’s eyes lit up when he saw the flash of red peeking out from the sides of their generously piled sandwiches. “A BLT?” he asked with delight. He sat with his face in full view, the helmet back with the Harley. Etienne had given up, much to Cian’s relief. The boy had been seen so what was the point in making him wear it now?

  Etienne smiled and pushed Cian’s plate toward him. “Just for you.” Which was not entirely true. Even though it had become Cian’s favorite, Etienne had been thrilled with his own first discovery of the BLT, which had not been around during his last sojourn in the Mortal Realm. He took a drink of water and bit into his own sandwich, relishing the mingled flavors of thick bacon and fresh tomato and mayonnaise on excellent toasted bread. The lettuce added a nice crunch, but you could not call it flavorful. He looked around as he chewed, trying to plan their next move. They had ended up in a large public market that looked like it took up at least two city blocks. On one side was a tourist area zoned for pedestrians only that extended several more cobble-paved blocks over. It bustled with young shoppers looking in windows and slipping in and out of store fronts. A few more blocks to the west was the waterfront.

  Etienne sighed in frustration. He had spent the morning wandering the city, racking his brain to try and remember any details from three weeks of conversations with Arthur that might help him locate the wizard. He could remember he had said he lived in Seahaven, and that his wife had opened a shop to keep herself busy. He said his family was huge and everyone had heard of them. Etienne had asked in several places if anyone knew the Reynolds family, only to receive reactions ranging from politely blank stares to the very suspicious, before he remembered that Arthur once mentioned that he had married into his wife’s family instead of going the other way around. That name he could not remember – it had not been important at the time. Just that it was Irish… or Scottish, maybe? He was just not that familiar with mortal names.

  He ground his teeth and pulled out the street map again. He had no idea why. It had gotten him to Moore Investments, but that was a new structure. Mortals had an unnerving habit of rearranging their architecture every few decades or so. The city probably looked dramatically different now than it had looked during the war. He looked over the map, tracing the morning’s route in his mind, and pinpointed their current location – the Seahaven Public Market in the Historical District.

  Yeah, that was a big help. He took another bite of his sandwich.

  “Where are we going next?” Cian asked before taking a drink of his water. He craned his neck, curious about all the colors and lines, but Etienne knew the boy could not read most of it, especially upside down. He simply was too new to English to decipher it.

  Etienne swallowed his food and pointed to the map. “I can see where we are and where we’ve been.” He ran his finger up the illustrated waterfront slowly. “What I can’t see is where we need to be.” He sat back and looked around them again. During the war, he remembered that the London phone boxes would often have books of names and numbers in them. That would have proven useful today. But since coming to the New World last year he had seen precious few of them and never with a book inside. There was a phone box within sight of their picnic table, but it contained neither book nor phone. Instead, it was decorated with flowers and filled with some sort of strange sculpture. He shook his head at the strangeness of mortals and looked back down at the map.

  Just above his resting fingertips, a spit of land was depicted stretching and forming the northern edge of Eriksson Bay. It was a slender arm extending out about a mile and widening slightly at the end of the point. Etienne’s eyes widened slightly as he remembered. “You should see the House someday, my friend. It sits on the tip of the Point, with Eriksson Bay on one side and the Pacific on the other. Glorious!” He looked over the map again, trying to be certain. There were a couple other smaller points jutting into the Bay, and several large islands, but only the one that straddled the boundary between bay and ocean. “I think I found him,” Etienne said at last, and grinned up at Cian over the map.

  Cian returned his grin with a bright smile of his own, and popped the last of his sandwich into his mouth, chewing happily.

  Etienne rushed through the rest of his lunch, eager to head out to the Point and find Arthur. He then washed it down with the last of his water and gathered up their paper plates. “Let’s go.” Cian followed him to dispose of them, where Etienne had reason to pause. There were two containers, side by side. The wire one he recognized as a trash bin, its open mouth nearly full with the remains of the lunch crowd. But the other was green and had a covered lid with two large holes in it. In relief on the top was
a strange triangle formed of arrows and lettering that distinctly said “No Trash.” How very odd. Wondering what he was expected to put in it, he tossed their plates and water bottles into the trash bin and turned away.

  “Hey! I saw that!”

  Etienne and Cian turned back to find a scowling woman with very colorful hair approaching them. “Pardon?” asked Etienne.

  She reached into the trash bin and pulled out the two water bottles. “The recycling is right here. Geez!” She then stuffed the bottles into the holes in the green bin.

  Etienne was baffled, but decided that apology would be the better part of valor. “Um… Sorry,” he said, but the colorful little woman was already moving away in a flutter of skirts, muttering under her breath about eco-senseless jackasses and saving the Earth. That made him pause again. Saving the Earth from what? He remembered occasional mentions along those lines when they lived on the therians’ farm in Kentucky, but he had chalked it up to strangeness on the part of their hosts.

  To be honest, no matter how much the Mortal Realm changed each time he sojourned here, a pack of therian wolves living on a farm in the middle of nowhere and trying to pretend it was still the Middle Ages was pretty damn strange. But they were good people and Etienne missed them. In his pocket was the number of the pack’s only phone, a reminder of the promise he made to their Wolf King, Kendrick, that he would call to let them know they had made it to Seahaven. A call which would be easier of he could find a working phone box.

  Etienne and Cian passed out of the Market and wove their way through the lunch time crowd back in the direction of the parking lot. A group of young women caught sight of Cian and fell to blushing twitters and giggles as they craned around each other to get a better view of him. Etienne released a long-suffering sigh. “And that, right there, is another reason I wanted you to stay in your helmet,” he scowled at Cian.

  Cian rolled his eyes. When had he started rolling his eyes? “I just don’t see what the problem is. I have two eyes, two ears, one nose and one mouth. How is that so different from human?”

  Etienne scowled harder. “Your hair, to start. No human has hair like that. It's not normal for them.”

  Cian waved his hand towards a young man with green spikes standing straight up from his head. “And that is?”

  Etienne opened his mouth to reply and closed it again. He had to admit there was no arguing with that.

  Guitar music filtered through the foot traffic and he looked around, finally finding a young man with an instrument that saw more love and attention than his clothing, sitting on the sidewalk between two storefront windows. His head was lowered over his guitar, eyes closed and long brown curls hiding much of his face as he gave himself over to his music. Etienne tapped Cian on the elbow to keep him from wandering on ahead without him and made his way toward the street musician, feeling the music pulling at him like a gentle hand. It was beautiful, even more beautiful than the music played in his mother’s court. The boy was better than Cian, who Etienne loved to listen to play.

  His music reminded him – Etienne stopped short, eyes wide – reminded him of his father. Chretien de Aquitaine had been a magnificent musician. His music and his beauty had drawn Etienne’s mother’s attention, much to the troubadour’s misfortune.

  He remembered sitting at his father’s knee as a child, learning to play. He wasn’t a quarter the musician his father was, but Chretien had never faulted him.

  He remembered his father’s suicide, when he lost his mother’s favor. He could never remember the good without remembering the bad.

  The street musician’s hands stilled on his strings, stroked the wood of the guitar, and finally looked up at Etienne through his long curls. A small, gentle smile brushed over his lips.

  Etienne was frozen, still struck by his memories. “Who…?”

  The young man shook his head. “The question you need to ask is ‘Where?’”

  Etienne’s brows drew in.

  The street musician stretched his thin arm and pointed down the block, deeper into the Historical District. “What you want is that way. Across the street and next door to the cupcake place. Olde Curiosity’s Gift Shoppe.”

  Etienne craned his neck to look down the sidewalk, and then snapped back to look down at the boy. “Did you say ‘Curiosity’s’?” Arthur’s wife had been a physician named Curiosity! He remembered!

  The boy’s gentle smile widened, and he nodded once. “Now you understand me.”

  Etienne dug into his jeans pocket and dropped the last of his change into the boy’s guitar case. He turned, eager to pursue this new lead, and then turned back to thank him. But what came out of his mouth was, “Who are you?”

  The boy swung his long hair back behind his shoulder, revealing more of his face. Pretty, but well within human normal. “I’m just Stephen. Welcome to Seahaven.”

  Etienne looked more closely at Stephen, and he was indeed as he appeared. Simply human. But then how was he able to do what he’d done? Clearing his throat to cover his confusion he said, “Well, thank you, Stephen.”

  The boy smiled and inclined his head with grace. “Anytime.” He then set to playing again.

  Recognizing a dismissal for what it was, Etienne turned away and headed down the sidewalk in the direction Stephen had indicated, Cian following close behind. Finally finding space to pull up alongside Etienne, Cian glanced back at the musician. “What happened?”

  Etienne gave a small frown, and then an even smaller shrug. “Not sure,” he said. “But, I think he’s sending us in the right direction.” And if they didn’t find Arthur or his wife here, it would cost them no gas, and he could always go back and ask this Stephen if there were any open street corners nearby for Cian to play on. So there was no real harm in trusting the musician. Though what he really needed was to find a small casino. Cian’s playing was good, but Stephen was better. Busking anywhere near him would guarantee Cian would not earn as much as usual.

  They came to the corner with the Public Market on their right and wonderful smells wafting from some sort of East Asian restaurant, East Meets West, just to their left. Across the street facing them was the cupcake place, Sweet Treats, with its little bistro tables lined up under a brightly striped awning. He was familiar with pastry shops from his last several sojourns, but a shop that sold only cupcakes was very strange.

  Beside Sweet Treats, pressed in between the confectionary and a large building with “Katherine’s Retreat” scrawled artistically over the open entryway was a small shop with a red door. The black sign that hung above the doorway was painted in flaking gold lettering in a style he recognized from a couple mortal centuries ago and which read, “Olde Curiosity’s Gift Shoppe.” He gave Cian’s coat sleeve a small tug to make sure the boy followed him as he set out across the pedestrian-only cobble-paved street.

  Beside the red door was a display window framed with cream-colored lace curtains, creating a picture out of a small wooden table and two cushioned chairs. The display on the table top had been completely picked over, leaving only the stands behind. Etienne leaned in to look deeper inside the store. The storefront was tiny, just some shelves built into the walls, some more shelves taking up floor space, and the counter that held the register behind which was a thickly beaded curtain he could not see through. The shelves were notably poorly stocked, and – he looked around the space again to make sure – the shop was empty. He stepped back, unsure of how to proceed. There was no open or closed sign visible. Should they just go in? Maybe Arthur’s wife – or even Arthur himself – was behind that bead curtain?

  “What should we do?” asked Cian, still peering into the empty store.

  Etienne shrugged and opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by a quiet voice breathy in reverence, “Hot damn.” He looked to his left to see a plump girl in glasses dressed in a wildly embroidered and beaded shirt and jeans, carrying a small cardboard box full of lunch sacks. She stood frozen on the sidewalk, lips parted slightly and brows raised f
or a long moment as she looked at Cian. Pretty little thing, she couldn’t be much older than his Bess when they married. She blinked, gave herself a small shake and looked away, cheeks flushing. “Um, yeah… right,” she muttered, keeping her eyes averted, she moved with purpose towards the red door.

  This caught Etienne’s full attention. “Miss, do you work here?” he asked.

  The girl turned back to face him, box balanced on one arm as she grasped the doorknob with her now free hand, and presented him with a pert smirk. “Nope. I just like to break in, leave lunch, and skip off merrily into the sunset.” She paused. “Except it’s too early. That won’t work.” She turned and pushed open the door. “Never mind.”

  Etienne crossed his arms and watched her move through the door. What exactly had that been all about?

  The girl turned and craned her head back through the open door, straight brown hair swinging in a curtain. “So, you guys coming in, or what”

  Etienne raised an eyebrow. “Can we look forward to more sass once we enter?”

  She grinned. “I like that. You do the eyebrow thing just like my boss.” She stepped further into the store, holding the door open with her backside. “You may enter, good sirs.”

  Cian laughed softly behind him, and Etienne shook his head, stepping past the girl into the little shop. Cheeky wench.

  She released the door when both men passed through and bellowed, “We got company!” as she set down her box on the counter. The sound echoed in the sparsely stocked store, and Etienne and Cian both cringed slightly at the effect the volume had on their sensitive ears.

  A moment later a young woman pushed the beaded curtain aside, a cross expression on her thin face. Etienne’s breath caught for an instant in shock. It was a sidhe woman, her white hair caught up in a loose bun, iridescent tendrils curled about her shoulders and catching the sunlight from the front window. “For pity’s sake, Jessie, don’t do that. The whole District now knows we have company.”