by Susan Conley
“If you’ll just wait here, I’ll let her know you are here.” Their guide stepped out.
“You need to sit?” Cart asked.
Mona looked over at the miniscule loveseat that took up the wall across from the door. The miasma permeated the dull, washed out material. She shook her head. “Don’t you feel it?”
Cart shook his head.
“I need to get out of here.” Between her worry for Raine and the miasma in the room she was seconds away from retching.
Thankfully, the door opened and a guy in a security uniform came through. Mona saw a bit of magic in him. Folk, possibly from a Were grandparent. He bowed in greeting, clearly recognizing them as Folk, and waved them out to the hall.
“Please, follow me.”
They walked with purpose down, through, across, and up a dizzying array of halls, elevators, and doors. After a bit Mona realized they were following signs to the birthing center. Cart constantly scanned the halls, as if marking each intersection in his mind. Probably was.
They were left in another room, this time far more spacious with two couches, a television, and little pamphlets on the side cabinets explaining everything from proper lactation technique to immunization schedules to post partum menu choices.
Raine was here, and was unlikely to survive. Emotions already raw, Mona clasped her hands to still their trembling.
Cart looked around the room, and headed over to the windows. Apparently okay with what he saw, he turned back. His gaze lingered on the literature display.
“So, how much Elf blood do you have?”
“What?” Mona asked. His question was akin to asking someone their salary. She frowned at him. “Obviously a lot, or I wouldn’t be a Warder.”
“I’m exactly half, but you know that.” Cart turned back to the windows. “My mom is a full elf, a Titania actually; Dad didn’t have a drop, which confounded her to no end since she thought he’d had some and counted on her magic to . . . um . . . take care of the rest.”
Ah yes, the magic only a Titania has to supplement a not-full elf’s ability and make him more powerful. And, rumor had it, allow them to control their fertility. She bet it had been a large surprise for his mother.
“Not sure why this is relevant, but my dad is a full elf. From Elfhaven, actually. Decided to adventure earth-side for a bit and met my mom. She was . . . I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess pretty close to full. Raised entirely outside the elf realms. She never went and apparently had no desire to go. In turn she raised us away from any of the Folk enclaves. I didn’t have much contact with Folk until I got curious about my heritage when I was in college.”
Cart nodded and waved his hands that he wanted her to continue.
“Mom was brought up in a commune and was very adamant about not becoming a number on a page, so we’re not on the books, despite father’s desire to add us,” Mona said. Most elves chose to enter their descendants in Elfhaven’s lineage books, so their descendants would be looked after should something happen to them. In order to get listed, a magical evaluation was necessary, something her mother would not tolerate for her or her children. “From what I’ve heard from my brother, their relationship was very much a case of ‘opposites attract.’ Dad was called back to Elfhaven when I was three; I’ve seen him a couple of times since then. Mom waited until Nic was eighteen, then left. Haven’t seen her since. Something thing Nic said made me think he thinks she’s dead, but I’m not sure.”
“But your father’s still alive? Do you know—”
A soft knock and a woman walked through the door, leaving it ajar behind her. Lots of Folk in her. She raised a finger to her lips, shushing the pair.
“Mr. and Mrs. Howard,” she said. “I’m afraid your sister isn’t doing well. Please have a seat and Dr. Pinchon will explain the matter to you.”
“Thank you, Nurse Ferguson,” the doctor said upon entering, immediately dismissing Fergie. He did not have a drop of Folk in him. “Please, have a seat.”
They did as he suggested. Cart wrapped his arm around Mona’s shoulders then took her opposite hand in his; Mona needed the comfort.
The news, delivered in a staccato, matter-of-fact tone by the specialist, wasn’t good. Raine, or Rebecca as she was on the charts here, was on life support. She’d had some possible brain damage due to lack of oxygen, but they wouldn’t be able to tell the extent until she regained consciousness. Which they hoped would happen in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
If it happened at all.
The babe seemed fine, and they placed its age to be about twenty-five weeks. They did stress a longer gestation would make a drastically significant difference in the baby’s chance of survival outside the womb.
Right now they were walking a fine line between what was best for the baby and what was best for “Rebecca.” There were no easy choices.
“Can we see her?” Mona asked.
Behind the doctor’s back Fergie nodded, like she had done the right thing.
“Only one of you can go in right now,” the doctor told them. “I’ll let you decide.”
“I don’t know that I could see her face to face right now,” Cart said. He turned to Mona. “Will you be up to it?”
Despite the roles they were playing, Mona heard the concern in his voice.
“I’ll be okay.”
“There’s a window you can look in on while your wife’s there, Mr. Howard,” Fergie said, earning a frown from the doctor. “It’s by the nurses’ station, but since the other two rooms on that side are empty right now I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
They went down the hall, the doctor leaving them as they prepped to go in the area. Taking a deep breath, Mona entered the room.
The bed was in the middle of the space. Monitors suspended from the ceiling created a bizarre sci-fi-esque headboard.
Raine was on the bed, unmoving and breathing shallowly.
And covered with more spells than before. In the past twenty-four to thirty-six hours, whoever set the spells had been in the area and Raine had seen him. They’d set a death rune, inextricably laced in, and over the other spells, the entire shape the deep crimson of the most intractable portion of the spells.
And there was nothing, nothing, she could to remove it and stop her friend from dying.
Tears streaming down her face, vowing to find the fiend, Mona stood by Raine’s side for a long time, looking over the tangle. She didn’t dare do much and risk putting things in imbalance. The best she hoped to do was delay things and save the baby.
Mona took Raine’s hand in hers, and immediately one of the tracking spells kicked in, sending out a silent alarm. She knew Cart saw it somehow, because she heard him mutter through the glass.
The beacon had been put on top of everything else and, uncharacteristically, was not attached to the earlier ones. Without thinking, Mona pulled it off. She couldn’t leave it here, that’d defeat the purpose of removing the working, so she collapsed the energy as much as she could, imagined it as a ball, and put the whole thing in her pocket, where it made an untidy lump.
Knowing she now had a limited time before whatever was sent interrupted her work, she looked over the spells to make sure nothing had changed. A slight turn of a rune and the inversion of the one next to it was all she risked. The spell instantly acted more slowly than before, hopefully creating enough time so the baby would have a better chance of survival.
Mona let go of Raine’s hand, leaned over, and kissed her forehead. She didn’t think she’d see her laughing, smiling friend again.
Once out of the room she was enveloped in Cart’s arms. His warmth calmed and frightened her. It’d been less than twenty-four hours since they’d met and she already felt connected to him. She should step away; she had a job she loved and he was a complication she didn’t need. But right now she needed the comfort far more than she’d realized.
“She’s not going to survive,” she finally murmured into his coat.
Sh
e hated that she couldn’t do anything to save Raine. Anger and frustration left her shaking. They needed to find out who this mage was.
Nurse Ferguson patted her back. “You did a good job just easing things for her, I think. Her monitors show her blood pressure is already down a bit.”
“I tried to buy enough time for the baby,” Mona said.
“We’re hopeful that you did,” Fergie said as she escorted them back down the hall. “Now wait here, and I’ll fetch someone to escort you out.”
Mona pushed her grief aside and made herself calm down. After several deep, shuddering breaths, she stepped away from Cart.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
His deliberately pronounced reply brought a faint smile to her lips as she remembered their earlier exchange.
The same guard came to take them back, and this time Mona recognized his Folk side to be a mix of mortal and fairy, unusual but not unheard of.
They hadn’t gone far when a speaker called for specific doctors needed in the ER. The escort stopped and listened to his shoulder walkie-talkie.
“There are armed men in the ER. One may have made it into the hospital proper. I’m thinking we need to get you out now.”
“That was quick, you just worked on the spell.” Cart’s soft aside made Mona feel bad about not telling him she had a tracking spell on her. She didn’t want to risk his telling her to leave it and jeopardize the lives of innocent people. Plus the further away from Raine she could get it, the better she’d feel.
They hurried down the hallway, Mona and Cart leaving their jackets behind so their arms would be free. The woman who manned the security door to the birthing center moved from behind an open desk to a Plexiglas-fronted vestibule. After looking around the corner to the area they were exiting into, she let them out.
The guard left Mona and Cart by a bank of elevators.
“Follow the signs to the radiology unit in the basement. Some of the doors may be blocked; when that happens try going up a floor to continue on. Once you get to radiology continue down the hall to the double doors. One is marked with radiation symbols and the other says employees only. Go through the employee side and there’ll be a door on your left marked linens. The room has an exit to the loading dock.
“Here.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out two IDs of people who looked similar but not quite like them. “These should get you through most doors, just don’t go into any of the surgery areas or cancer wards if you can possibly avoid them.”
Mona tweaked the spells on each and now the pictures were exact.
Then they strode, walking urgently but not running, up stairs, down stairs, along corridors. Unlike their first walk, they didn’t run into many people, most were staying put and out of the halls.
They did, however, run into locked doors and closed corridors that the IDs did not open. The calls over the intercom became more frequent. Soon it became clear that the announcements were naming sections Mona and Cart had just gone through. The spell in Mona’s pocket was still sending out signals.
“You took the tracking spell with you, didn’t you?” Cart asked, only slightly out of breath from having just gone up two flights of stairs at a run.
Unlike Mona, who was valiantly ignoring the stitch in her side.
“Yes, and I can’t leave it. Do you have a faster way to get us out?”
“Can’t jump, if that’s what you’re asking. There’s a warding around the building.”
She’d seen the runes, but hadn’t read them deeply enough to realize there was a containment element.
“We’re not splitting up,” he said before she could even think of it.
“Okay, let’s booby trap the path,” said Mona.
They moved a meal cart behind the door to a stairwell making it almost impossible to open without sending the whole thing crashing down the stairs. In another stairwell several wheelchairs someone had stashed on a landing became a pileup for someone to fight their way through. Even though the emergency paging for “doctors” stopped, Cart, showing strength Mona could not even begin to fathom, flipped a cot across one of stairwell doorways, managing to wedge it in the process.
After that, they made their way to the basement. As they came to the bottom of a stairwell they checked the signs; radiology was clearly marked.
“Paging Dr. Armstrong, code silver in radiology.”
Slowing down, they peered around a corner to see several guards, including the one from earlier, using zip-ties to handcuff the Were. The cuffed man also had a low level binding spell, something the half-fairy could set with out the others noticing.
Mona watched as the magical working on the Were pushed and shoved at the simple spell, distorting the edges and weakening the sigils. She reached out and tweaked the runes, avoiding those that were darker colored. She shifted things around and pulled the binding tighter by strengthening the power behind them.
The energy coalesced. Oh shit, the secondary spell, the summoning that would force him into his Were, then strip the energy, was taking hold. But this Were looked to have the balance to shift, unlike the others. She hoped he would survive.
“Drop him!” she yelled as she pulled their guard’s hand off the Were.
They watched as his features distorted, the smell of blood and fear overwhelming the hallway as he was forced to shift. A wolverine as large as mountain lion stood in his place. Mona watched the vortex behind him.
A distorted face appeared, a gleeful grin sending shivers down her spine. The magic lassoed out to pull the shifted Were across.
The wolverine turned and struck at the phantom face. The entire spell collapsed and the creature vanished.
“Shit! That’s the working you’ve been seeing?” Cart swore and pulled Mona away from the residual magic. “We need to get out of here.”
The mortal guards stared at the spot then swung around, scanning up and down the hall, guns drawn.
“Thanks,” the Folk guard whispered. “Now get out of here before they decide you aided and abetted his getaway.”
He jerked his head in the direction they needed to move. Later Mona would need to track this man down and thank him for his help.
“There!” Pointing in the opposite direction the guard took off as if he’d seen something. The two mortals followed him.
Cart led them around one more corner, and finally to the laundry room where large wheeled baskets piled with bags of dirty linens flanked the walls. The loading dock bays were closed, but there was a small side door. The only problem was the large alarm handle across it.
“Do you think he’s disabled it?” she asked.
“He may have taken the connectors off the main system.” Cart pointed to a small matchbox-sized box along the door’s header with wires running out of it. “But this type also has its own internal alarm, which will sound once we open the door. I’ll see what I can do.”
He pulled out an army knife and twiddled with the faceplate.
Two seconds later the alarm sounded.
“Hell!” He grabbed her wrist and bolted through the door.
Already there were cruisers, lights flashing, streaking around the far edge of the building toward them.
Mona looked for the line of the warding spell . . . there! The working glimmered at the top of the driveway. Reaching out, she tweaked the edge closer. Two steps and they were over it.
“Jump!” she yelled.
Cart slung his arm over her shoulder, pulling her to his chest as a shot rang out and they entered the blackness.
This time Mona was able to watch as the blackness streaked past them and the world faded away. She’d been right, there were faint streaks of color creating specters of dark on dark. Radiating magic, they didn’t seem good nor bad, just elemental.
Before she could process any more, they tumbled onto the bed back at Cart’s room in the Were protector’s headquarters.
Mona was flat on her back and Cart was on top of her, causing all
sorts of pleasant, if un-actionable tingling in private places.
“Okay,” Cart said as he nuzzled his nose under her ear and kissed her neck, “while I could live without the sudden departures we’ve had to do, I do enjoy the arrivals.”
She definitely was aware of his reaction; it warmed her inner thigh.
“We need to get out of here!” Her shoves at his shoulder ineffectual. “I still have that beacon on me!”
“Crap!”
They scrambled off the bed.
“Can’t go to Tania’s, can’t go . . . hell, I don’t know anyplace close enough that’s not associated with Weres!” Cart said.
“I do.”
“I can’t jump someplace I’ve never seen, Mona.”
“Maybe I can feed you the information? There’s got to be some way!”
His look turned inscrutable.
“The airport?” she asked since her last suggestion didn’t seem to be workable.
“No, I’ve never been.” Most Folk avoided airplane travel due to the disruption of magic fields the planes caused as they tore through the air. “How far is it?”
“About fifty miles.”
“I’ll try. No matter what I do, keep the image of where we should go in your mind.”
“Is it too far? I can—”
“Just do it!”
Mona set the image of the coal burning plant on its rocky promontory in her mind and the pier that paralleled it creating a small bay. She could toss the spell in there. Due to the pollution, there were no Folk in the waters who’d be affected by the beacon and the factory’s discharge meant it wouldn’t be iced over.
She closed her eyes to better concentrate.
“Keep concentrating.” He grabbed her face and kissed her. Knock-your-socks-off kissed her.
His magic enveloped her in a hug as warm as the hands on her face. Despite the temptation to melt against him, she managed to keep the image in her mind.
Once she determinedly ignored how his magic seemed to be permeating her pores, the image became clearer, a memory of wind and the waves against the rocks and seagulls screeching in the air.