by Barb Taub
She twisted to straddle him, wriggling until her leggings were…almost…just right…over his jeans. She heard him gasp softly. “If you don’t hold still, this will all be over before…”
A voice spoke almost directly outside the closet. “I need a smoke. Cover for me?”
Eirie felt Liam tense beneath her.
Another voice, further away. “If that bastard Marano catches you smoking in here, you’ll be lucky if all he does is fire you.”
“Fine. I’m outside for fifteen. Then I’ll cover for you.”
Their footsteps moved off. Liam’s exhaled breath was the faintest of groans, but he moved away as she pulled down her shirt and zipped her hoodie. “Okay.” She was surprised by how even her voice sounded. “You take the files and I’ll try for computer access. We’re done here in ten. Start the count?” She heard a soft sound as if he was adjusting his jeans.
“Counting. Dammit.”
The hardest part about opening the locked record storage was making sure the locks appeared undamaged. Liam located her mother’s folder and snapped pictures of its few pages and then of others nearby. While he flipped through research documents, she slipped out to the receptionist’s desk in the lobby. After looking under the blotter and through the drawers, she felt under the desktop. Score! Thanks to security protocols that required passwords to be both complicated and frequently changed, she knew that receptionists often kept forbidden copies of their passwords hidden in case they forgot them. A moment later, she had booted the machine and was copying from its related network drives onto her little external drive. Hoping she had retrieved something useful, she turned off the machine and disconnected. With a glance at her watch, she signaled to Liam that it was time to leave.
Neither spoke until they were back in the car.
After uploading the camera’s memory card and the contents of her hard drive to the Agency for analysis, she turned to him. “Liam, about that closet…” In the light from the computer screen, she saw his features freeze back into his usual impassive mask.
“That won’t happen again.”
He was going to be difficult. That electric current writhed in her chest, making breathing painful. She lifted her head and forced her lips to curve. “Oh, you mean I only get kissed in dark closets?”
“That was goodbye, Radio-girl.” He started the car, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. “Next step is probably for you to talk to your grandmother and find out what she knows, while I track down the surrogate’s details. Check in twice a day and encrypted updates to the usual numbers?”
Keep it light. “One of the reasons I like you as partner, Liam, is that you never go all ‘Hey, you need to let me protect you.’”
“I’m here to fight crime, not take care of a princess. Anyway, I think I could take you in a fair fight, but since I’ve never known you to fight any way but dirty…”
“That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me!” Impulsively, she covered his hand with hers, but he ignored her until she moved away. She watched his face flicker in and out of shadow in the streetlights as he drove to the Agency’s car drop. Neither looked back as they headed away from the car in separate directions.
Two days later Eirie was peering through tree limbs overlooking a small house in the woods above San Francisco when she heard an owl hooting. She replied with several low calls until she heard bushes rustling nearby. “We can only hope Matias León doesn’t know there are no barn owls in these woods. Liam. I’m up here.”
“Of course you are.” Moments later, he was a few branches below her. “Why is it always ‘climb up’ with you?” She smiled as Liam tested the next branch up. He eyed her perched above him. “That branch won’t hold both of us. Come down.”
They backed some distance from the house before he turned to her. “What have you got?”
“My Granny Danu might be retired as goddess, but she can still scan for her descendants. She says the baby is in there.” She held out Gran’s scrying mirror and showed him the image of the little house, flickering into the baby sleeping in the portable crib. “It took a couple of days to triangulate this location but Google Earth finally nailed it.”
For the first time, she saw a crack in his impassive demeanor, but his voice was flatter than ever. “Your grandmother. She’s the Goddess Danu?”
“Retired goddess. And there might be a few ‘greats’ in Grandmother…”
When he just stared at her, she frowned. “I don’t see how this is much different from me being a fairy princess, and you didn’t have a problem with that.”
“That’s because I didn’t believe it. I thought you just had your ears done, like those vampire wannabes who have fangs grafted onto their teeth. I figured you made up the rest as backstory. You do live in Seattle after all.”
“Cosmetic surgery? Eeew, please. And if that crack about Seattle is referring to the Fremont statue of the troll eating the Volkswagen, that’s actually my cousin Stanley and he was having a really bad day.”
His eyes widened and she shoved him. “Gotcha.”
Liam pulled off his gloves and gently touched the tip of her ear. She shivered and reached up to cover his fingers.
“Liam?”
His hand wandered through her glittery curls and down to cup her cheek. As he moved closer, she felt his chest move with each breath, smelled leather and man. She closed her eyes and leaned into him.
He dropped his hand and stepped back. "I don’t have a supernatural grandparent, so I ended up here the old-fashioned way—tracking the phone Matias used to contact Dr. Marano."
Righty. Job first. She flattened her voice to an impersonal staccato. “So what have you got?”
“I checked with the doctor who autopsied the dead surrogate. Apparently she didn’t have your aversion to cosmetic surgery because she’d had work done. A lot of it.” He opened his phone to show her two pictures. The first, labeled “Before” showed a smiling young woman with a pretty, nondescript face. The second, “After,” showed… her mother.
“And that’s not all. On her phone, they found this.” He went to the next screen and pushed PLAY. Words appeared on a black screen. Screen Test—Niamh Danu. As Eirie stared, a black and white image of her mother appeared. There was no sound, but the image on the screen smiled and moved her lips in silent speech, opened her eyes wide, and flipped the dark curls tumbling over her shoulders.
“Stop it. Just…stop.” Hell with being a professional. Eirie choked and turned away.
Liam shut off the phone and turned his back to give her a moment. Then she heard him curse under his breath and his arms were around her. “Your mother wanted to be an actress?”
“Of course she did. She wanted anything that promised adoration. It was her food, her air.”
“It was a set up to get hold of the Treasures.”
She nodded against his jacket. “Gran thinks so too. She thinks someone found out and killed my mother before she could take them.” She paused and then spoke each word as if she had no idea what the word following it might be. “I sometimes wondered why her lover brought the gun. Or if it might have been my father—or Gran—who killed her that way.”
“Nice family.” His voice held no emotion.
Her laugh was shaky, but she managed to straighten her shoulders and move away from him. “We’ll never be on a Hallmark card. But this does tell us why Matias León needs the baby.” At his raised eyebrow, she explained. “Only my family can touch the Treasures, and only the king—my father—can touch more than one at a time. If she looked like my mother the surrogate could have gotten in, but she couldn’t have touched the Treasures. If she was pregnant with my baby sister, though, she could have taken one of them. But why?”
“With your mother gone and your father a drunk, who has the most to gain?”
“Even drunk, Dad’s pretty formidable. And if he holds the Sword and the Spear, he’d be unbeatable as long as he doesn’t leave Tír na nÓg. Oh. So that’s what this is a
ll about. They want to draw him out here where he’ll be vulnerable. Matias and that surrogate couldn’t have gotten into Tír na nÓg to steal the Treasure without help from someone inside. Now that my mother is dead and my Gran is retired, if they take out my father, the throne will belong to the baby. And they will control her. Dad played right into their hands with his stupid one-week ultimatum. Now we only have two more days left to stop it.”
They worked their way back toward the little house. As they lay flat behind some boulders, Liam tapped her shoulder and breathed into her ear. “At least we know this is the right place.” He pointed to a couple of soccer balls at the nearby edge of the open lawn leading to the house.
The air shimmered and Eirie sucked in a breath. “Oops.”
Liam raised an eyebrow as a group of tall, beautiful men with pointed ears solidified before the little house.
“I keep forgetting that time doesn’t work the same way in Tír na nÓg. Their one-week grace period must be up.” Eirie shook her head. “This is not good. See the one in the front with the Spear? That would be Dad.”
A man holding a baby appeared in the doorway of the house.
She groaned softly. “And that would be Matias with the Sword of Núadu strapped to his side.”
“Do you think he knows how to use it?” Liam sounded skeptical.
“Doesn’t matter. If one of my family holds it, they can’t be defeated. But how does he expect to…”
“If you come one step closer, I’ll tie your daughter to the hilt of this sword.” The fae soldiers and their king froze.
“Not happening.” As Eirie started to rise, Liam held her down. “Wait.” He pulled out his gun but her hiss stopped him.
“No—it will only go wrong. You have to believe me.” He looked into her eyes for a heartbeat, nodded, and threw the gun into the bushes behind them.
“We need a way to separate Matias from the baby before we can do anything else.”
Eirie looked thoughtful. “I’m on it.” Liam faded back into the bushes as she stripped off the dark hoodie. She stepped out, sunlight gleaming on her gilt-tipped curls, and walked toward the door. “Stop.” All eyes swung to her. “I’m Eirieu Airmed, Daughter of Danu, Princess Royal of the Tuatha Dé Danann of Tír na nÓg.”
•●•
Like everyone else, Liam stared. How had she hidden, in plain sight, all the months he’d known her? His partner was supposed to be a punk-dressing, ass-kicking, smart-mouthed…well—partner. He teased her when she was on the radio, depended on her when she was in the field, and ignored the attraction sizzling between them. But Liam was pretty sure he’d never met the regal sylph gliding across to stand before Matias. A beam of sun dazzled the pink-purple curls, and for a moment he thought he saw a crown reflected in their glitter.
“Matias León, if you put down the baby, I give you my word as bound to the Goddess Danu, that I will obey any order I hear you speak this day. I’ll wield the Sword of Núadu in your defense should you request it.” She dipped her head elegantly and looked up through thickly lashed lavender eyes. “Or…anything else…you may wish.”
No. Hell no. Liam clenched his jaw on his growls. Okay, so maybe she was more than just a partner. For a heartbeat frozen in time, nobody else moved. In the silence, the baby sounded like she was choking. Her tiny face turned red and her little body seemed to spasm. Matias looked desperate. He started to lift the baby but wasn’t fast enough before she spat a surprisingly large volume over his chest. An additional grunt was followed by a smell that had all the fae soldiers taking an involuntary step back. The baby gurgled serenely and closed her eyes.
“Puke and crap. It’s all she ever does. I have no idea how such a little thing has so much coming out of her. Here.” Matias thrust the baby into Eirie’s arms. Then he pulled a pistol and pressed it to the gilt curls above her softly pointed ear. Her slender form seemed even smaller as she hunched protectively over the infant. Liam ground his teeth.
Matias screamed at the king. “I found your bitch wife’s letters to my father. He was going to leave us, go off with her to Hollywood. She told him about the Treasures, and how they would be able to get anything they wanted from you if they had one of them. But it was all some kind of a trick. He loved me. I know he would have come back for me if it wasn’t for you and your damn treasures.”
Liam wasn’t breathing as he watched a nightmare unfold around a woman who was sure as hell more than his partner. The gun pressed to her head didn’t even need to have the trigger pulled. It could just explode, and she would be gone, taking with her every hope of fun and glitter and excitement his world would ever know.
Eirie turned her head slightly, looked directly at Liam and smiled. It wasn’t a pretty smile. She hunched further down over the baby, leaving Matias’ head exposed. Reaching for the soccer ball at his feet, he returned her smile before the former world-champion footballer sent the ball screaming for Matias. As her captor’s head slammed against the door jamb, Eirie tucked the baby under one arm and spun around with the edge of her hand whistling through the air to smash into Matias’ throat.
She put the baby up on her shoulder and absently patted the little back while she stared down at the choking man at her feet. “Matias, there’s something you should know about me. I don’t fight fair. What’s that? I’m sorry, I know I promised to obey any orders you spoke, but somehow I’m not hearing any orders coming from you. I just keep hearing you threatening my sister.”
Liam pounded up and pulled both Eirie and the baby into his arms. “Never.” He could hardly grind the words out. “Never again. You will never try something like that again.”
She turned in his arms until her lips were almost on his. “I thought you were here to fight crime, not to protect princesses? But then, I guess lots of senior citizens have memory issues. Maybe you need a calmer life, partner.” He groaned, gave up, and kissed her.
He lifted his head and turned toward Matias. “What I need, right now, is to finish killing him. A lot. Then we can talk about what else I need. And Fairy Princess, it’s a very long list. Might take all night. Or the rest of our lives.”
She stepped between them to speak to the gasping man at her feet. “I should let Liam kill you. I’d kind of like to kill you myself. But it seems pretty obvious that you were part of an assault on the Tuatha Dé Danann, first my mother and now my father. Since I doubt you figured all this out on your own, I’m going to let Dad and his friends take you away and discuss your behavior issues. The baby says buh-bye.”
Eirie lifted the baby from her shoulder, wrinkled her nose, and gasped. “I have to talk to Dad. Do you know how to…” He laughed and tucked the infant into a bent elbow. “Five younger brothers and sisters. I’ve got this one.” From the window in front of the table where he cleaned and dressed the baby, he saw Eirie and her father talking. Of course, Eirie was doing most of the talking and her father was doing most of the head shaking. Then the air did that shimmer thing again and a tall, beautiful woman joined them. She seemed to do even more of the talking than Eirie. Finally, the king bowed deeply to the woman, touched Eirie’s cheek, and the air shimmered as he departed.
Liam blinked. Now the tall lady looked more like an older woman in tennis shorts and a polo shirt.
The door opened and the two women entered the little house. Liam handed Eirie the baby and stepped in front of them. She moved under his arm. “This is my gran,” Eirie introduced. He stepped aside and the older woman swept up the baby and looked into her dark eyes. “I name you Naeve Bridgid, daughter of Danu and princess of the Tuatha Dé Danann.” She kissed Naeve and handed her to Eirie. “And I give you into your sister’s keeping to raise and love.”
Eirie looked worried. “Yes, but Gran, don’t you think…” The air shimmered and she was gone. “I hate it when she does that.” She looked nervously at the blanket-swaddled bundle in her arms. Naeve gazed solemnly back, and puckered her tiny mouth. A moment later Eirie jumped and almost dropped her as a piercin
g scream split the air. “Is she dying?”
Liam laughed, reached for the baby, and slung her over his shoulder. Naeve looked interested, and her screams subsided. “I’m guessing she’s hungry. I’ll show you what to do.”
When the baby had been fed and fallen asleep, Liam reached for Eirie’s hands. “What do you want to do now?”
“Gran told me about a place called Null City. Everyone who goes there turns into a normal human within a day of their arrival. In Null City, Naeve can have a regular life, and be safe until she’s old enough to choose her own path. It will be good for both of us.”
Liam looked at her in disbelief. Then he went batshit crazy. In furious whispers so they wouldn’t wake the baby, he told her how bad that idea was. His list covered her lack of experience with babies, Naeve’s development, their need for a support system, her job prospects—and that was just the beginning. But although she waited, although she tried to read the emotions behind every word, although she told herself that he would say it—he never mentioned feelings for her. Never mentioned them being together. And just what were you expecting? His class ring and request to go steady? Happily ever after is for fairy tales, and you abdicated.
They fought through the night. Finally she wearily closed her eyes and told him she had to make decisions based on what was best for the baby. When she looked up, the old emotionless Liam stood before her. As if they’d never been anything but partners, he reminded her that they would need to see Dr. Tom before she left.
Two days later, an exhausted Eirie faced Dr. Tom across his desk while Liam leaned back against the wall, arms folded and face impassive. “Matias was right about one thing,” she told Dr. Tom. “All Naeve does is scream, eat, scream, throw up, scream, make diaper messes that should be on toxic waste cleanup lists, and sleep—but never for more than an hour or so at a time.” So why is it, she asked herself, that all she has to do is hold my finger and smell so sweet and shove that little head into my shoulder and I’m going to fight the world for her?