“So how do we make it stable?”
“We don’t.” The old Warder stumped over to fetch her gun and the blanket in which she’d wrapped it out of the hallway closet, but as she passed me she gave me a stern, uncompromising look. “It’s his power, girlie, not yours or mine. He’s the one that has to settle up with Seattle to Ward it proper, and he can’t do it until he’s ready.”
I blinked, and then reluctantly bobbed my head. In other words, no pushing Christopher—a decision I’d already made anyway. “Okay. You also should know something’s happened to my boss; I called in and found out he doesn’t remember who I am.”
Aggie froze in the middle of closing the dishwasher. “The same thing that happened to Will,” she breathed. Next to her, Jude shifted uneasily from foot to foot, looking like she wondered whether our boss’s sudden, bizarrely specific amnesia was catching.
Her expression turning thunderous, Millicent let out a blistering oath and smacked a palm against the nearest wall. “It’s another goddamned Pact violation, is what it is,” she growled. Then she whirled back to me. “And all the more reason for you to stay in this house till I get back from walking the Wards. If the Sidhe we’re after are willing to cut you off from your mortal connections like this—”
“But why?” I cried. “If it’s me they want, why would they mess around with people close to me?”
Millie sighed, pushed her hat back upon her head, and clapped a hand onto my shoulder. “It makes you vulnerable, honey. Easier to corner you into whatever they want you for. And until we know what they want and get you able to protect yourself, it’d be stupid to give them a shot at you. Or Aggie. Or Jude.”
The dread lurking in the bottom of my mind roiled, promising to spike back up if I didn’t keep it in check. I pulled it off, but not completely; a nervous little quaver escaped into my voice. “T-then maybe you shouldn’t go. If it’s that serious, you should stay—help us figure out what to do next!”
“And how to help James,” Jude added, to which I vehemently nodded.
“Honey, I need to watch over all of Seattle, not just you,” Millie said. “And I can’t afford to slack off even one day. Best thing I can do for your boss is to find out who our Seelie troublemakers are and get ’em the hell out of my city. I’ve got a couple of contacts in Magnolia and Ballard. I’m going to head that way, find ’em, and see if they can tell me anything, and do the Wards in that part of the city at the same time.”
Short of telling the magical protector of the city how to do a job I barely understood, I saw no option before me but following her orders. I didn’t like it one bit—but what else could I do? I heaved a sigh of resignation and said, “What should we do while you’re gone? You said something about people we could email?”
To that, the old Warder produced a scribbled note from one of her pockets. “Here are the addresses. They’re Warders, like me. Email ’em, say I sent you, and ask ’em what we need to know.”
“Maybe we ought to call whoever you talked to this morning,” Jude suggested, leaning against the counter and reaching restlessly underneath her shirt. Her fingers drew out a pendant and fidgeted with it, over and over, as she spoke.
Millicent waved that off. “Won’t work. The Pact doesn’t forbid me sharing the number, but Verlaan’s finicky. She’ll barely talk to me or any other Warder, much less others of mortal blood.” Her lip curled. “Most of the Sidhe are like that.”
“We’ll do what we can. We’ll send those emails, and call you if we need you,” I said, and Millie nodded.
“You do that, girlie. And all of you—not one foot outside till I get back.”
* * *
Jude and I returned to the den, leaving my aunt to check in with her boutique and handle what business of the day she could by phone. Christopher perked up from his slump on the love seat when I handed him Tylenol and water, and he watched me with eyes gone green and amber as I took the first turn at the computer. A command prompt was all I needed to log in to my account on my server at home, and in seconds, I’d launched my usual email program.
What to write to Millie’s Warder contacts, on the other hand, required considerably more thought.
Her note listed three addresses and the names that went with each, so I wrote one note to cover all three. It took me long enough as it was to figure out how to introduce myself to these people, mention Millicent, and explain what we needed to know without repeating the effort. More than once, my fingers hesitated over the keys. As I tried to describe the red-haired Sidhe who’d thralled me, they shook.
I finished with a request for as fast a reply as possible, fired off the message, and scrubbed the back of my hand across my eyes. Then Christopher laid a hand upon my arm.
“While we’re sendin’ out word to the Warders, do you think your aunt would mind if I…” I looked up to find him standing behind me, his face unsettled, nervous. It seemed to cost him effort to continue, “If I used her phone?” He fished through his pockets as he spoke, pulling out random coins and a crumpled dollar bill. “I can pay her for it.”
“It ought to be fine,” I said, quirking curious brows. “Who do you want to call?”
The question clearly disturbed him; he couldn’t quite meet my eyes as he answered it. “My uncle Thomas… Thomas Hallett… he probably would’ve taken over Wardin’ St. John’s when my… when I left. He ought to know what’s become o’ me.”
Not knowing quite what to say, I just nodded after a moment. “It ought to be fine,” I repeated, more gently.
Aggie was as amenable to letting him make the call as I thought she’d be. She and Jude retreated out to the living room to give him appropriate privacy, and I would have joined them if something in Christopher’s expression hadn’t kept me lingering at the door to the den. He didn’t seem to notice I hadn’t left; all his attention was on the phone, and he handled it gingerly, as if it were radioactive. Guilt nagged at me for peeking at ties between a man I barely knew and a family I didn’t know at all, ties I’d begun to suspect had badly frayed if not broken. What exactly could I, a stranger, do to help repair them?
But I didn’t move. I watched Christopher dial a lengthy string of numbers and blanch as he got through. His mouth opened. It closed. Then, without uttering a word, he hung up. Shame flushed his face, and he slumped in defeat against the love seat’s arm.
I retreated then, unwilling to intrude any further.
Jude took over the computer when we returned several minutes later, her round face intent and her fingers flying over the keys with a rat-a-tat-tat much like the noise of the rain on the roof. Windows flew open on the screen at her touch, including a web browser and the login dialog for our company’s remote access mail server. “Okay,” she murmured, “let’s see if today’s faerie mischief extends to company computers.”
Her login name and password worked. Mine didn’t. “Millicent said the Sidhe will use technology just like we will,” I said, disturbed. “Guess this proves it.” Then I glanced at Christopher. “Unless you know whether magic might have deleted my account from the system?”
Christopher had retreated to the love seat once more, though he sat leaning forward watching us as we in turn hovered around the computer. “I’ve never known it to happen, but then again, I’m not much with the things myself,” he admitted. “And I’m not after seekin’ out the Sidhe for the last many years, anyway. They could have extended Faerie into the Internet and I’d have missed it.”
Faerie, fey things, Sidhe, and magic overlapping with the real world was unnerving enough; I didn’t want to begin to think about them online too. Hells bells, something as serious—and yet, at the same time, oddly run-of-the-mill—as a computer security breach was almost too much to add to two days’ worth of reality rewriting itself around me. It underscored, all too clearly, everything that would fall out of the abrupt evaporation of my job. That little problem clamored for my attention, but I exiled it to a back row of the orchestra of my mind. It went, but under duress, and droned
just loudly enough to keep my nerves keyed up to a strained, fretful pitch.
Jude, at least, confirmed she’d gone unscathed by any electronic meddling. Her account still peacefully resided in the company’s web and mail systems, and she could still remotely access her office computer. That let her find out my absence from the nTrust intranet wasn’t complete; mail I’d sent was still in her inbox, and bugs I’d opened against the product we’d just shipped still came up in searches on the test server database.
“One of two scenarios,” she mused to me as she typed. “One, whoever pulled this off made with the mojo on James, got him to think whatever would get him to get you out of the system, and he came in and had ITG pull you out of the employee records.”
My hands kept nervously fidgeting. Vexed at them, I jammed them into the pockets of my shorts. “Sounds plausible enough,” I sighed. “What’s the second scenario?”
“The culprit zapped you out of James’ brain and whoever else’s, broke into our systems last night, and nuked you out of the employee database himself.”
Neither scenario sounded good. Each led to the same result: James had succumbed to something that had scrambled his brains, and maybe everybody else on team had too.
Because of me.
* * *
Aggie made us lunch, though none of us were interested in food. Fortunately, no one had to tell my aunt. Lunch was sandwiches and soda, quickly prepared and just as quickly eaten, barely noticed as we debated the question of how Jude had escaped what had happened to James.
“What happened after Christopher and I left the bar last night?” I asked her. “I didn’t see you when you came out after us.”
“Well, I didn’t take long to follow you. I saw you go over to talk to Christopher, and I saw you two bolt right while… shit.” Jude set her glass down on the kitchen table with a thump, oblivious to the remnants of soda and ice within it as she stared over at me, putting two and two together in her thoughts. “It was while the Unseelie was singing. I skipped out because I wanted to know what was going on with you, Ken. What’d he say his name was?”
“Elessir,” I provided. I didn’t want to. Just uttering his name summoned a ghost of his voice to drift across the back of my mind, and I shivered at its intrusion even as I forced it away. Too restless to sit still, I went to empty the dishwasher as I went on, “But there was just one of him and three of the Seelie. Can one Sidhe mess with the minds of a whole crowd?”
Aggie, sipping the last of her own soda, pointed out, “Kendie baby, one human singer can whip up the heads of a whole crowd with nothing more than stage presence and a voice.”
She had a point, and Christopher backed her up. He rose from his place at the table to help me with the dishes, saying, “Music’s meant to do that—stir the heart.” For just a second or two he paused, something like homesickness flickering across his eyes, and I wished I knew what he missed. But he shook himself out of its grip; when he spoke again, his voice was dour. “And there’s none can listen to a Sidhe singin’ and not come through it unchanged. If the Sidhe’s a mage as well, there’s no tellin’ what he can put into your head just by singin’ it there.”
“They’re not all mages? But aren’t Sidhe magic?” How did I fit in with this new piece of data?
“All Sidhe are magic,” Christopher agreed, his face as dour as his voice. Looking up at him, I realized he’d taken the bandage off his brow sometime during the morning, leaving the stitched gash at his hairline and the fiercely bruised flesh around it in view. It made him look less vulnerable, which was reassuring, but it also made him look rougher, which was not. “Only some do magic. And when it’s sung by a Sidhe who’s also a mage… a song is a weapon.”
Christopher’s words haunted me as the afternoon wore on. So did the Sidhe. Fragments of Elessir’s singing interwove themselves with flashes of the touch and voice of the Seelie leader; together, the still-vivid impressions curled through my thoughts like liquid smoke. I had to keep reminding myself I was in a safe haven in the company of two of the people I cared most about in the world, and I had to fight to keep the prickling energy churning somewhere beneath my skin in check. It wanted out. And I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go before I’d have to let it.
Worried as I was about what had happened to James and maybe everybody else on our team as well, I called Carson and Jake the first chance I got. But that soothed none of my niggling fears, for the number Jake had left me turned out to be the front desk of a hostel up in the San Juans. Yes, the desk clerk told me, Mr. Saunders and Mr. Tanaka were registered guests. They weren’t in, but she’d be happy to take a message. I left one, asking the boys to call me at Aggie’s number as soon as they could, and hung up more ill at ease than I’d been before I made the call.
We killed time as best we could for the rest of the afternoon: playing cards, reading books, watching television programs none of us could remember when they were over. Jude and I regularly checked the computer for answers to the emails I’d sent out; one of the Warder addresses bounced back after half an hour, with an alert in my inbox that my mail server couldn’t get a connection to deliver the message to its destination. Other than that, nothing.
Aggie worked on her latest quilt.
Jude borrowed one of my aunt’s robes, threw her clothes into the washer, and took a shower.
Christopher napped.
I wanted my violin with a ferocity I could almost taste. Jude, emerging from the bathroom just in time to see me fidgeting with my hands, called me on it—or rather, called me on it to Christopher as he stirred on the couch. “Kendis plays the violin, you know.”
He beamed at me. “I’d like to hear you play,” he murmured drowsily.
“Sure,” I blurted, ignoring the blush that flooded my face and the mischievous grin Jude wore as she sauntered off down the hall. “Any time.”
Through it all, there was no sign of Millicent.
Early on in the afternoon, we weren’t bothered. Neither Jude nor I had clue one about how long walking Wards should take; Aggie could share only that she’d known her to take most of a day wandering the city to renew its protections. That, though, fit with what Christopher could tell us: the bigger a city, the more effort and time had to go into monitoring the Wards laid around it.
But the afternoon became evening, and the old Warder woman did not return.
When we couldn’t reach her on her cell phone, we began to worry.
Chapter Thirteen
“Nothing,” I told the others as I hung up for the fifth time in an hour. “Can’t even tell if her phone is working—I keep getting shunted to her voice mail.”
We’d gathered in the living room again, unable to focus on anything but Millicent’s ongoing absence. Darkness had begun to fall outside, augmented by the cloud cover, and the gloomy weather threw a pall across our spirits. None of us needed help imagining any number of reasons why the old Warder woman might have gone incommunicado; the rain, drizzling down in erratic fits and spurts, only served to encourage fearing the worst.
Coiled up in the papasan chair, clad in her rumpled but freshly washed clothing, Jude fidgeted with her necklace. “And we’re sure we have no other way of reaching her?”
She’d asked that question already, and the answer hadn’t changed. “Aunt Aggie’s got no other number for her,” I said, pacing to the front door and peering yet again out through the blinds next to it into the rain. Part of me hoped that if I kept up a vigilant watch, I’d see Millicent appear.
With a half-done quilt and a wicker basket full of colorful scraps of cloth, spools of thread, thimbles, and needles to occupy her hands, my aunt was not in a position to pace. But her gaze followed me every time I looked out the window. “The cell number’s the only one she’s had for the past nine years,” she affirmed. “She doesn’t keep a land line; she says it’s cheaper for her.”
“And we can’t go check her home without riskin’ goin’ outside this house’s Wards,” said Christopher.
After his catnap and his turn in the shower, he looked more collected, more alert. He sat perched on the arm of the couch instead of pacing, but one of his feet tapped out a faint, muffled rhythm against Aggie’s hardwood floor.
“So what options do we have left?” Jude looked back and forth between us all, seeming prepared to dissect the problem at hand till it broke down into pieces she could vanquish. I’d seen the same expression on her face thousands of times at work, and as I glanced her way, seeing that expression again stopped me in my tracks.
Was I going to get to go back to that, the sheer normalcy of working with my friend? Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes at the thought, and with difficulty, I blinked them away.
Right now, it was better not to think about it.
“One comes to mind,” I said, “but you all aren’t going to like it. I know I don’t.” Three pairs of eyes blinked at me, and with more than a little trepidation I went on, “We could contact the Unseelie. Elessir. He wanted to talk to me anyway.”
If I’d been a rabid rhino stampeding across the room, the reaction couldn’t have been more alarmed. Jude jolted as if the papasan had just delivered her a few thousand volts; Aggie yelped, the oddest noise I’d ever heard her make, and only after a moment did I realize she’d also jabbed her needle into her finger while staring in shock at me. As for Christopher, he leaped to his feet, indignation and fright suffusing his face and turning his eyes bright amber.
“I thought I was the one that took a blow to the head!” he shouted. “Have you not heard a word I’ve said about the Unseelie? What in the name of God do you want to contact one for?”
“Can you find her?” I yelled right back.
It threw him. “Can I—what, how?”
“She’s a Warder! You’re a Warder!” He winced as I used that word to his face, but I didn’t let up. “Millie said she felt your blood hit the grass, that she was able to track you. Can you track her?”
Faerie Blood Page 15