by R. J. Blain
Because if the children hadn’t wandered off, if someone had taken them, then certainly the kidnappers were using magic to hide them.
Law’s lip curled back in a snarl. “Magic won’t stop me.”
Mal’s mouth twisted in a crooked smile. “Effrayant has rules, remember? You can’t break those. Your oath won’t let you. Elliot doesn’t have that problem. He doesn’t have to care about ethics or privacy or whether or not anybody is a guest. Take him.”
Law’s mouth worked like he wanted to spit, and he nodded. He swept Elliot into his arms and pressed a kiss to Mal’s cheek.
“Stay safe.”
As he walked away, Mal watched the play of muscles beneath his crisp navy shirt. That last was uncalled for. She was going to look at a crime scene, for cripes sake. She wasn’t walking into an ambush or a war zone.
She glanced at Merrow.
She hoped she wasn’t, she amended to herself. But she wouldn’t put it past the elf not to warn her. It would be one way to get Mal to practice combat skills, at any rate.
Chapter Two
Before starting out, Mal had Edna collect the rest of the ghosts and head off to help with the search. In the meantime, a custodian delivered a pair of clean overalls to her. Apparently LeeAnne didn’t want Mal wandering around Effrayant in a bikini and covered in blood. She supposed it sent a bad message.
Mal dressed, stuffing the severed hand into one of the large zip pockets, and proceeded to follow Merrow.
They took the elevator to the ground floor and went outside into the central courtyard. A cloistered arcade spread out, connecting all the towers, then ran farther down into an enormous formal garden with an amphitheater that sat a thousand humans, a huge pavilion, a lake and combination ice and water park, plus several other amenities.
They crossed the courtyard and moved between the towers on the opposite side into a large vegetable and fruit garden. Really more like a farm. Here they picked up the pearly gray spell trail she’d cast. It led them across the front of the garden near a shed on the northeastern corner.
“I think this is where Elliot encountered the hand,” Merrow said, pointing to a spot beneath an enormous bean bush.
Mal could see where Elliot had been snacking on the beans.
“The rest of the owner is over here.”
Merrow led the way up the row. The greenery was thick, and Mal almost tripped over the giant’s body. Mostly because it wasn’t particularly giantlike. In fact, he was only about three and a half or maybe four feet tall. He was no child. He had a full, long beard and his long brown hair was caught up on his head in a topknot.
He’d also been mutilated. Lacerations cross-hatched his body from head to toe. Flies buzzed thickly in the wounds. Mal cast a quick spell to chase them off and preserve the corpse.
She squatted down to get a closer look. Law hadn’t been surprised by the size of the hand, which meant he hadn’t been shrunk as part of the attack. Which meant he was a mini giant. Who knew they were even a thing?
“What do you think?” she asked Merrow.
“He was chased here. And he wasn’t alone.”
“Who’d want to kill him?”
“Impossible to say. They covered their tracks, literally. Or flew.”
“We’ll see about that,” Mal murmured, examining the wounds. They were only about two inches long each. “These don’t look like regular knife wounds, do they? They’re kind of ragged and scalloped on one end. Ever seen anything like it?”
“No.”
“Me either, but it’s a distinctive weapon, so if we find it, we find the killer.”
“Or killers,” Merrow said. “Very small weapons, as well. Possibly pixie-sized.”
“That would definitely put a damper on the wedding,” Mal said, straightening up. “You said he wasn’t alone?”
“The rest of his group are back by the trees. That’s where things get weird.”
Because a ridiculously small giant getting his hand chopped off wasn’t already weird?
“Lead the way.”
Mal expected there to be more of trail, at least of broken foliage, but there was little, giving more credence to the idea that the giant had been chased by pixies, who would have been flying.
The rest of the giants were stacked on top of each other and skewered through with a long spear, which had to have taken real force.
These varied in size, with two being typical giant height—one closer to sixteen feet tall, the other closer to eighteen—while the rest were small. All were male. Mal assumed the weird part was that they’d been hacked up. Not dismembered, exactly, but cut up and cut apart like somebody had been looking for something inside them. Several had holes in their rib cages big enough to allow arms to poke inside. Big arms. Or maybe just made to look that way.
Some of the intestines and organs had been pulled out and dropped onto the ground as if they had been in the way of the search.
“Funny how the attackers looked inside but didn’t seem to search the clothing,” Mal noted.
“Think they found what they were looking for?” asked Merrow.
“Hard to say.”
They had to have been searching for the talisman Law was talking about. Couldn’t be very big, not if it was something for a pixie to carry or wear. Maybe the attackers thought the giants would swallow it? Or insert it under their skin? Mal couldn’t imagine a whole lot of other explanations for hacking up their bodies.
“Not much we can do here. Better if you go help look for the missing kids,” she told Merrow. “I’ll look around a little more and see what else I can find out.
Merrow gave a short nod and vanished.
Mal walked around the stack of bodies. Either there had been quite a few attackers, or they’d had magical help. Actually, she had no doubt they’d had magical help; without it, they couldn’t have hidden their actions from LeeAnne and Law, who were so intimately tied to Effrayant.
Mal frowned. Same with the missing kids, if they’d been kidnapped. And two events like that happening nearly at the same time couldn’t be coincidence. Had one been a distraction from the other? She tried to make sense of the timelines, but the only conclusion she could draw was that she had far too little information to make sense of it.
She attempted a magical reconstruction of events and quickly discovered that a short-circuiting spell had been left behind. They couldn’t be sensed until triggered, and they made any spells cast in a specific vicinity go haywire. They could be cleaned up, but there wasn’t much point. Cleaning meant scouring up every bit of magic, which defeated the purpose. Its influence would wear off eventually, and Mal wasn’t going to waste energy neutralizing it if there was no benefit.
She examined the bodies and the ground, finding no evidence of footprints or fingerprints. The attackers had been careful. She did find a fragment of steel that might have come from a weapon, but she couldn’t be sure. She put it in one of the cavernous pockets of her coveralls. She circled the scene, spiraling outward, stopping once to cast a protective spell on her bare feet, before continuing. The feeling of being watched itched at her until it sharpened into a pointed jab. She couldn’t see any watchers but pulled a protective shield around herself. It wouldn’t help against human weapons, but at the moment, those weren’t her major concern.
She found what she was looking for in a thick part of the woods. It appeared to be a camp. She found where several large and small giants had bedded down. There was no sign of a fire, so they’d cold-camped. Probably to help go undetected.
This time she didn’t cast a spell, not wanting to risk erasing evidence. Instead she walked carefully around the perimeter, examining every little thing she could find, which wasn’t much. She found some mounds where they’d dug holes for their waste, and that was about it.
Question was, were these the victims or the killers? She had no way to tell.
She ground her teeth in frustration. There had to be something here to tell her something concrete.
Mal tried to imagine how it had gone down. Had the giant in the garden run before or after the others had been killed and searched? Except for his hand, the wounds he’d suffered were shallow, more for pain than anything else. Nothing like the others. What did that mean? That they knew he didn’t have the talisman? Or that they quickly found it on him and stopped looking?
Having no answers and no way to find any, she continued her search, but found only a single clue twenty feet up in a tree. The bark had been scraped off in a three foot high patch. Unwilling to leave it unchecked, Mal climbed up, cursing when her fingernails broke and peeled back on the rough bark. Still, she kept going.
She was able to perch on a limb a little above and to the left of the scar. She draped herself over the limb, hanging by her hips, and eased down to look more closely at the wound on the tree.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured, her fingers running over three parallel scrapes that she hadn’t been able to see before. Each was about three inches deep, and more than a foot long. What had caused those?
The blood started to pool in her head, and she pushed herself upright to sit on the limb and think. What the hell had happened? The scrape was too high for even the giants to make, unless they had some sort of tool, which there was no evidence of, unless you counted the giant spear pinning them all to the ground like a restaurant’s order spindle. But she doubted that had made the scrapes.
She leaned against the tree, thinking. So one group brings the talisman, and the second tries to steal it, and probably succeeded, though maybe the victims had managed to hide it first.
Mal glanced around the thickly wooded area. Needle in a haystack. Needle in a dump truck load of needles. If it were here, finding it would take a lot of time and luck.
Her stomach growled and she remembered she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was well past lunchtime. Not that she would get a chance to eat, but she needed to report her find to LeeAnne and Law and then go help with the search.
She took one more glance around. Where would she hide a tiny little talisman if she were being chased, didn’t have much time to hide it, and didn’t want it to be found by the wrong people but needed it to be found by the right people? Obviously that last part was crucial. Magical talismans weren’t exactly something you could get at Walmart, and if it had been especially made for this ceremony, then chances were it had taken time and effort. Mal doubted it could be easily replicated.
The attackers had thought that the victims would have hidden it within their bodies—a fact that disturbed Mal to no end and raised a whole lot of questions about giants and whether they’d ever heard of locks or vaults or even fake soup cans or books that were really hiding places for treasure—but if the victims thought they might be attacked and the talisman put at risk, wouldn’t they have come up with a different emergency plan? Something unexpected? Also a possibility: What if someone suspected a traitor in their midst and secretly hid the talisman elsewhere?
Mal nodded. All right. Assuming the victims were not stupid, what would they have done? They clearly hadn’t really had a chance to split up, so it had to be something they could do while together and something that could be uncovered by allies but not by enemies.
She chewed a ragged nail, contemplating the possibilities. Assuming that pixies and small giants gained the most from this marriage, it made sense that whoever hid the talisman would be putting it somewhere for them to find.
Pixies could fly. It made sense to hide the talisman high. Some giants, like virdanas, had magical powers, but she didn’t know how powerful, what kind, or how many might have them. So assume no magic for now. How would a small giant get high enough to hide a talisman for a pixie to find while still in the company of traitorous companions?
As a lookout? But then his companions would see where he went and look there. Throw it? That was risky unless the giant had excellent aim and could communicate the location to his pixie allies. It still left a lot of woods to search, though.
Mal looked at the marks on the tree. How would a small giant get all the way up here without anyone noticing? He’d have had to sneak away and do it before…
Crap. What if the giant had figured out there was an attack coming and decided to hide the talisman and make the mark the night before, while everyone was sleeping? He’d have had all the time he needed to do both.
Clearly, he wasn’t stupid, so he wouldn’t have hidden the talisman too close to where he’d made the mark. It was a message telling someone how to find it. The question was, what did it say?
Mal couldn’t sense any magic about it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. An untriggered spell wouldn’t show up until it kicked on. She didn’t want to risk another erasing spell, so she didn’t try to unmask anything.
“Use your brain, then,” she told herself. “What could these marks possibly tell someone? Not just someone, a pixie.”
For starters, they had to tell someone where to start looking. Even pirate maps said count three steps from the big yellow rock or whatever. You had to have a starting spot.
She frowned. Wait. What if the marks weren’t the only part of the message? The patch scraped clean of bark was awfully big. Overkill, really. What if it meant an open space? Like the garden?
She tilted her head and looked at the three lines, trying to orient where they might be in relation to the lay of the garden. She decided they must be located on the side opposite to where she and Merrow had found the giant with the severed hand. Mal had no idea what was there. She didn’t know if she’d forgotten or if she’d ever even known. Either way, it was time to find out.
Chapter Three
It took a half hour to return to the garden. She found a deer path, which made it a lot easier to wend her way through the thick underbrush and forest debris. A twenty-foot border of wildflowers surrounded the garden, no doubt to make sure the edges received plenty of sunshine.
The afternoon was warm, so Mal stuck to the tree line as she jogged around to the other side of the garden. Once there, she waded through the flowers to the edge of the rows of squash and walked along, looking for something that the three marks might have referred to.
When she found them, it was so obvious as to be stupid. It was also clever and unexpected. Hiding in plain sight and well-guarded.
Three stout towers rose up out of the wildflowers. Wreathed with wisteria, they were crowned with broad platforms, at least forty feet in diameter, each boasting an enormous nest made of logs, sticks, moss, mud, and whatever else the owners had scavenged. The smell from them was strong and not unpleasant. Musky and sweet, with a hint of citrus.
There were a lot of possible inhabitants, and most all of them were going to be less than pleased to be disturbed. Especially since Mal wasn’t bringing gifts, and she didn’t have time to go fetch any.
Mal shrugged. They’d have to get over it.
“Hello? Is someone home?” She used magic to knock on the platform, the noise sharp in the bright afternoon.
She heard movement; then a bird head blocked the sun. Good. That ruled out some very grumpy possibilities. Long, light feathers fluttered in the breeze behind its head, and while Mal couldn’t make out details, she could see that it had a wicked beak that could probably snap a person in half without any trouble at all.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she called up, “but there’s been some murders and I’m looking for an object that a very small giant might have given you or hidden here to keep safe. Would you happen to know anything about it?”
Many unusual sentences had come out of her mouth over the years, but that was certainly one of the most ridiculous.
The bird made a low szurring sound and hopped up onto the side of its nest. Another head popped up behind it. Bigger. In the other nests, other birds stuck their heads up curiously. Mal gave them all a little wave and repeated her greeting.
The birds made more sounds to each other, and the first one turned and hopped back down into the
nest, while one on the left platform launched up into the air, circling once before coming to settle in front of Mal.
It was possibly the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life. Its long, hooked beak was cobalt blue; its eyes, orange. Blue-edged white feathers ran over its head and down its long neck, where they morphed to full blue. The undersides of its wings were rose-pink with cobalt tips. Six long curling plumes rose from its crest. Its legs were blue-banded with black, and it had six more curling plumes for a tail. These were half again as long as its body and were white-edged blue feathers with little orange eyes at the ends of each.
Mal gave a little bow since she couldn’t imagine not bowing to such an incredible being.
“Thank you for coming down,” she said. “I really must find the object the small giant hid before it’s too late.”
The bird’s head tilted, and it blinked at her.
Too late for what?
She heard the words in her head. She’d experienced enough of that lately that she didn’t even bat an eyelash.
“There’s a wedding, and without that talisman, it can’t go on. That little giant died to protect it and make sure the wedding can proceed. I’d like to see his last wishes come true.”
Who are you?
Mal hesitated, not entirely sure how to answer. Finally she settled for, “LeeAnne, the housekeeper, asked me to look into the situation.”
We would have protected him. Given him shelter. He said no.
That surprised Mal. Less that the giant had said no—he wouldn’t have abandoned his friends and possibly family—but that the bird offered shelter. The big mythological birds weren’t known for their friendliness.
“That was kind.”
Mal had the impression of a shrug.
We lost nothing in helping him.
And gained nothing but Mal didn’t say so.
“Do you have the talisman?”
Climb toward my home. You will find it on the sunrise side below the midpoint.