Death Kissed

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “Gabe!” he shouted. “Sophia!” He bolted around the adobe.

  The van teetered on a pile of what was left of his garage. The door into the house stuck out from under the back tires, and the garage door under the front. The concrete of the floor lay strewn about like beach sand. His snowblower sat on its side against the adobe of the old mission.

  No way the van, even if it had been capable of moving, would have gotten off that rubble in one piece.

  “Where are my kids?” He peered into the bush. “Gabe! Sophia!” he called again as he scrambled up the rubble pile.

  The van was empty. He peered in through the back windows looking for any clue. “The kids’ phones.”

  “Careful!” Wrenn called from down below.

  Ed crawled in through the open back passenger door. No blood. No burn marks, either, which was good. He fished the phones out of the back and tucked them into his pockets with his own. “I don’t think they’re wounded.”

  Wrenn closed her eyes as if listening. “He can move fast in stallion form,” she said.

  Ed clambered down the rubble pile. “How fast? Which direction? Are they riding him? Riding a kelpie is seriously bad juju, isn’t it?”

  Was one of his kids carrying that damned sword like it was Excalibur or something? He had a flash of Gabe dealing with all the crap that came with being the Once and Future King.

  Because they needed that, too.

  “Ranger won’t hurt them,” said Wrenn. Her expression said the rest of what she was thinking: He’ll leave that for the vampires.

  That kelpie wasn’t going to survive this. He’d be dead before the sun came up. Either the vamps would kill him, or the elves would.

  Or Ed would do it himself.

  Ranger had crossed the line from capture-and-detain to clear-and-present-danger the moment he’d stepped out of the fae realms. He, like the vamps, was the magical equivalent of a rabid animal.

  Ed pulled out his own phone and dialed. “Bjorn,” he said. “We’re in Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge near South Padre Island.” He hung up. The elves might be able to dial themselves in with their magic in some sort of Heartway way… but he’d never seen them do so. Ever. They flew in airplanes like everyone else.

  Which meant they’d be here in the morning, at the earliest.

  Wrenn peered through the trees. “The clans want you, not your kids, Ed.”

  Ed wasn’t so sure about that. Not after Sophia’s bout with… something… on Samhain evening. He couldn’t remember. “They’re bait. I know. Answer my questions. Which way? How far ahead are they?”

  She held up her hand as if she were listening for something.

  Back in Alfheim, Bjorn had zapped him with a spell to clear away his fatigue. Which it had. But he was pretty sure the shortness of temper that always happened when he needed sleep was still there. Still festering. Still making him hotheaded.

  That hotheadedness was what had gotten him into his original vampire problem.

  She looked around. “We need a plan,” she said.

  Ah, yes, he thought. Our best-laid plans.

  Wrenn shook her head, then peered into the trees again. “I don’t see where they are,” she said. “Ranger’s not actively spiking his magic. I think I hear Red.”

  The sword was still talking to her. “What’s it saying? Is it aware that it’s with my kids?” Because the other magical artifact seemed well aware when it was around children.

  “She keeps repeating ‘We bind thee, Fenrir.’ I can track her, but she’s not stable enough to help.” Wrenn snatched a good-sized branch off the ground. “So we need a plan, especially if we run into vampires.” She twirled it around her hand. “Will one of these work on the local vamps if I use it as a stake?”

  Fenrir, he thought. “Fenrir?” he asked.

  Fenrir meant Ragnarok.

  And Ragnarok meant an end to the elves.

  He didn’t know that for sure. But then again, most people who got a cancer diagnosis didn't know for sure that it was going to kill them. Who knew? You might get hit by a bus instead.

  “Fenrir,” he sighed. Ragnarok was going to kill him. He was pretty sure of it. “I need to get my kids.” Get them home and make plans to keep his family as safe as possible during the end of the world.

  The expression on Wrenn’s face suggested that she was a lot better at reading people than her brother. It also suggested that she was a lot better at making sure other people didn’t read her. “You do understand that if this leads to one of us—or Ranger, for that matter—killing Warren Clayton, there’s going to be a war.”

  Ed sighed again. “From my understanding, the kelpies thought they could profit off the vamp-on-vamp violence that’s already going on.” He pushed his way into the brush again. “As a great man once said, ‘Let them fight.’”

  The faster the dark magicals killed each other off, the fewer of them they’d have to deal with post-Ragnarok. If there was going to be a post-Ragnarok.

  “They’re kidnapping regular fae and feeding them to the vampires,” Wrenn said.

  “That damned kelpie kidnapped my regular kids and he’s about to feed them to the vampires!” Ed shouted.

  Whatever Bjorn had done to counter his fatigue hadn’t propped up the mechanisms he used to keep his hotheadedness under control. Probably because that control came from a lot of what his wife called metacognition.

  Wrenn peered at Ed’s eyes. “Bjorn Thorsson’s anti-fatigue spell is wearing off.” She didn’t ask. She stated.

  “You think, Victorsdottir?”

  Her jaw clenched. “I was on the brink of drowning. Victor found me. He made sure I didn’t die.” She blinked three, four times in rapid succession. “He told me I couldn’t leave because he’d built a monster and that monster wanted me as his mate.”

  “And?” Ed asked. She was big and strong and could have smacked the living shit out of that fop he’d seen in the Heartway so she was running on excuses.

  Her lip twitched. “You’re his friend, aren’t you?”

  “Who?” he responded, though he knew damned well who she meant.

  “The monster.”

  Ed laughed. “You believed what Victor Frankenstein told you?”

  “He tried to drown me.” Her voice had turned ice cold.

  Ed blinked. “Victor tried to drown you? I thought you said he’d saved you.”

  She looked as if she was about to throw a punch. “Your friend tried to drown me,” she spat through clenched teeth.

  And there it was. The railroad connecting two hundred years of Wrenn Goodfellow’s beliefs contained a hub of fakery around which she’d built a good chunk of her life. Was it Ed’s job to rip down the façade? Maybe. Maybe not. But he was a hothead, and like she said, Frank was his friend.

  “You think Frank tried to drown you?” He laughed again. “Frank, who has lived with the elves since that ice thing with your fa—Victor Frankenstein? Frank’s a teddy bear.” A preoccupied teddy bear, but still a teddy bear.

  “His name is Frank?” she asked.

  Had she calmed down? “Yes,” he answered. “He did not try to drown you, Wrenn of the fae. I will stake my reputation on that.” Of course he didn’t know for sure if it was a lie. How could he? But he had a pretty good sense of human behavior. “Do you really think the elves of Alfheim would have adopted a murderer?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  He realized immediately the hypocrisy of his statement. “Those two vampires were an experiment. The elves wanted to see if they could help them be better. They did, for seventy years. Then…” He waved his hand toward the coast. “The point is that we all knew what those two vampires were, but the elves, they had to try. We all know what Frank is, too. There’s no need to try, with him.”

  Her lips thinned. “I have Victor’s notes. His logs. I have proof.”

  Ed threw his hands into the air. “Did the fae get those for you?” She sure was holding on tight to those beliefs, wasn’t s
he? “Because something tells me you’re firmly under the thumb of your precious King Oberon.”

  She pushed by him. “I have a kelpie to bring in.”

  “A kelpie who just happened to help you steal an elven artifact that’s talking up Ragnarok, for Odin’s sake! And drops you into Alfheim? Where your brother Victor told you is a monster just happens to live? Right after we have a fae problem?” A fae problem that probably involved Frank in the first place.

  Ed pushed by Wrenn. “You are being played,” he said. Fae always played. “Stay away from my kids!” he roared. The elves were enough. He didn’t need his own fae problem.

  A whooping roar echoed between the walls.

  A helicopter.

  No lights were visible in the sky, and with the trees muffling and distorting sound, Ed had no way to tell where the copter was. It wasn’t nearby, that was for sure. “That sounded about a mile away,” he said.

  Wrenn climbed up into a hollow in the old mission’s walls. She tested the adobe on either side, chose the west side, and jumped for the broken top of the wall.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  She hung from the side of the wall, now a good seven feet off the ground, and hand-over-handed her way toward the taller, sturdier corner of the old building. “I might be able to see Ranger’s magic from up here.”

  Or that damned sword. “I think it came from the east.” Which meant the coast.

  Wrenn’s hand slipped. Pebbles dropped to the dirt. She kicked her foot into the adobe as if she were digging into a cupcake.

  “Careful,” Ed said.

  “Yes, Dad,” she responded as she pulled herself up to the top of the broken adobe wall.

  Wrenn crouched a good fifteen feet up on the old mission’s corner like some black clad superhero. She gripped the wall with one hand and shielded her eyes from the starlight with the other.

  The copter’s engine shutting down echoed through the area.

  “There!” She pointed due east, toward the coast, as he suspected. “Lights. Magic, too.”

  Ed hopped up on the hollow and did his best to see over the trees. There was definitely a glow that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  “There’s a helicopter!” Wrenn jumped the full fifteen feet down from the wall. She landed, skipped, and rolled like some parkour jumper who knew exactly what they were doing. “Try to keep up, lawman,” she said, and darted into the trees.

  She’d outstrip him with her longer legs even if he kept pace. “I’m the one with the gun!” he called.

  She didn’t even look back.

  He’d pissed her off with his comments about Frank and Victor Frankenstein. Here he was in the scrub brush in a South Texas wildlife reserve with a fae version of Frank Victorsson—because she was Frank’s sister, no matter how much she wanted to argue about it—and he’d made her mad enough that she’d left him behind.

  Chapter 23

  Gabe Martinez wasn’t sure when the kelpie turned into a stallion. He wasn’t sure how he or Sophie got onto his back, either, or how the sword had gotten all tangled up with the leather and rings of the kelpie’s bridle.

  Ranger had touched the sword and a wave had blasted off it like a big thick-walled bubble. Then they were moving, even though they weren’t—like Ranger and the sword had loaded the van, and the floor, and the garage door, and the snowblower all on a flatbed truck like the ones they use to film actors driving cars. It was all fake. Moving, yet not, and someone else was in control.

  It wasn’t Ranger, either. Or the sword. Then Gabe blinked and they weren’t in the van anymore. They were on Ranger’s back galloping toward the coast and the beach and the sand.

  Sophia held tight to Gabe’s waist. She buried her face in his t-shirt and mumbled things he couldn’t hear. The sword glowed in real, visible light. Gabe coiled Ranger’s mane around his hands and held on with all his strength, and prayed his sister would do the same.

  He’d promised Momma he’d keep her safe.

  Ranger dropped into a trot and picked his way down the grass-covered slopes to the sands of a beach. The moon shimmered just above the horizon and cast a long trail of silver over the ocean. Waves lapped on the beach. Something howled in the distance. And two bubbles of town light glowed not too far away—the closer of the two to the north and the larger, more distant, glow to the south.

  Gabe had no idea where they were other than on a beach someplace a lot warmer than Minnesota. It could be California, or Florida, or somewhere in South America, for all he knew. But he didn’t think so.

  “South Texas,” Sophia said.

  They were on the Gulf Coast. The glow to the north was probably South Padre Island.

  “The ocean stinks,” Sophia said.

  The Gulf of Mexico smelled pretty much the same as the California beaches—sandy and sour and like water you should never drink. Some people liked the smell, but Gabe found it gross. Lake Superior smelled big and full of living things, too, except Lake Superior didn’t smell like someone had left a salted dead turtle to rot in the sun.

  Maybe the stink wasn’t the water. Maybe it was the kelpie.

  “Ranger smells like a dead seahorse,” Sophie said.

  Between the s at the start of “seahorse” and the s at the end, they dropped from the back of a huge stallion onto their butts in the sand.

  Ranger, now back in his black kilt and with the sword in his hand, stood over them. “I smell like my loch, missy,” he drawled. “Love ye too, by the bye.” He squatted and peered at both of them as if to check that they were still pristine and tasty for the vampires. “Either o’ ye move an inch an’ I’ll slice you up, aye?”

  Sophia leaned toward him. “Tell the truth, Ranger,” she said.

  He sighed and rubbed at his face with his free hand. Then he looked over his shoulder at the glow that had to be South Padre Island. “Th’ vampires will be here soon.” He nodded toward the brush in the direction they’d ridden in from. “They watch for activity at tha’ Heartway gate. They ken somethin’ yummy’s come through for their wee appetites.” He frowned. “Children are a delicacy, it seems. ‘Nother reason they like bein’ this close t’ the border.” He nodded south. Then he groaned. “I should send ye in wi’ th’ sword an’ instructions on how t’ make it go boom again.”

  Gabe opened his mouth to ask about the sword, but Sophia touched his arm and shook her head. She wanted Ranger to talk.

  “So ye think I’m gonnae do th’ villain monologue thing? Tell ye my plans, is that it?” He rubbed his face again. “Should be obvious to ye two, bein’ th’ smartlings ye are.”

  “Trading us won’t save your life,” Sophia said.

  He chuckled.

  “Why didn’t you go home?” Gabe asked. “You could have, right? When you brought us here through that gate? Why didn’t you leave us behind and vanish?” He was selfish enough.

  Ranger stood and looked back at the island. “I broke th’ Queen’s code,” he said. “Me an’ my two brothers, we left th’ stables durin’ th’ ruckus, an’ instead of respondin’ t’ th’ Queen’s call, we visited th’ King’s castle.” He rubbed his face again. “My brothers would do anythin’ I told ‘em to do.” He sniffed and snorted. “Not too bright, those two.”

  “You’re the smart one,” Sophia said.

  Gone was the defiance she’d had when she’d called him a moron back at the house, like she actually meant what she said. Ranger was the “smart one” in all this.

  He laughed. “I’m th’ old one.” He looked Gabe over. “I’m gonnae give ye a boon, my intelligent young friend.”

  Gabe raised his hands. “No deals!”

  Ranger’s eyes narrowed. “A boon is freely given. If ye dinnae want it, that’s yer problem.” He nodded toward Sophia. “I’ll give it to Miss Ne’er-the-oracle over here instead.”

  “We decline all gifts from the fae!” Gabe said. He didn’t want to come out of this owing a kelpie a favor. If they survived.

  “There ar
en’t that many o’ us left.” Ranger ignored Gabe and tapped his chest. “Us kelpies. We… fell out o’ favor. Now we all live in th’ Queen’s stables.” He sighed. “No matter how any o’ us bluster about how we’re gonnae take yer lakes, we cannae. King’s orders.” He rubbed his forehead this time. “I hope the Queen shows my brothers mercy.” He looked down at Sophia as if asking her for confirmation.

  “I’m not an oracle,” she said.

  He rubbed the tip of his nose. “No, ye aren’t, are ye? But ye know who is.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He nodded. “Tell her I tried.”

  “I will.”

  He nodded again. “Goin’ home isnae an option, nae when I’m wanted by th’ Royal Guard for crimes against the King. So I’m permanently on the lam, as they say.” He chuckled and waved at the universe. “Ye want the truth, eh?” He squatted next to Sophia again. “How important is the truth right now, Miss Ne’er-the-oracle?”

  Slowly Sophia reached out, and just as slowly, she touched his face. “Maybe you are worthy.”

  Ranger laughed. “My kind will ne’er again be allowed such power an’ ye ken that, Ne’er-the-oracle.”

  Sophia shrugged.

  Whooping echoed off the water and individual lights over the glow grew distinct.

  A helicopter approached.

  Ranger stood. He spun the sword around his wrist before sticking it into the sand. “The plan.” He winked at Gabe. “The vamps give me control o’ th’ fae side o’ th’ arrangements an’ I give them ye two as compensation. They stop feedin’ on my few remainin’ brothers an’ return to th’ old ways o’ feedin’ on only those we provide.” He inhaled, then exhaled slowly. “Vampires can fight amongst themselves all they want, but no more riskin’ Titania an’ Oberon.”

  Sophia squeezed Gabe’s arm again.

  Ranger looked down at Gabe as the copter approached and whipped up the air. “Now ye keep the young lady here while I talk to Mr. Clayton, understand? Ye’re mundanes. Dinnae run an’ cause th’ vamps t’ chase ye. They cannae help themselves when there’s prey.” He winked again. “Neither can I.”