by Ruth Vincent
“And we don’t have that much time.”
I squatted down next to him.
“What about this?” I pulled the Vale Cleaver out of my pocket. The hilt pulsed beneath my hand.
“That wouldn’t work. That blade is even bigger than my penknife, and my penknife is already too large.”
“I don’t mean to pick the lock with, silly. This blade is magic; it opens things. I know we don’t want to open up another world, but what would happen if we gave just a little prick to that door?”
“We could try it,” Obadiah said.
“I guess it can’t hurt, right?” I said doubtfully. I could create some kind of portal in Korvus’ door. I could destroy his house, and then he’d definitely know we’d been here. My mother would protect me from Korvus’ wrath. However, despite his malevolence, I felt guilty at the possibility of potentially destroying his home.
I stared off through the trees. If we didn’t act soon, he’d come back and we’d lose our chance to spy.
“Come on, let’s try it,” I said to Obadiah, and taking the pulsing knife in my fingers, I gave the door the slightest prick, just enough to draw one bead of blood if the wood had been flesh. There was a rending crack, and for a second, I was terrified that we’d broken Korvus’ door, but instead it merely swung open, neither hinge nor lock harmed.
I grinned up at Obadiah, hardly believing our luck.
“Well, in we go, then?” I said, and he squeezed my hand.
The tree was indeed only a vestibule, and it culminated in a staircase that spiraled down into the darkness of the earth. Luckily it was well lit with Perpetual Candles. As we descended, moving from light to light along the wall, it occurred to me that even these most mundane of magical items had been manufactured with Elixir; we were totally dependent on the stuff. At last we came to the base of the stairs, where an arched doorway led to what appeared to be a study. I motioned Obadiah silently to go inside.
I tiptoed as I crossed the threshold, not that there was any sign of anyone other than us being here. I felt guilty sneaking around like this. It made me feel low, ashamed. But I knew we could never trust Korvus to give us a straight answer. One didn’t rise as far as he had in twenty-three years without being crafty and manipulative. Spying was the only way we were going to find out anything real.
The room was illuminated by more Perpetual Candles. It was stuffy and dank down here, absent of windows, but maybe that didn’t bother an underground-living goblin like Korvus. I could see a desk, covered by a mess of papers. For such an efficient administrator I’d expected Korvus to be neat and organized, but his desk was even messier than mine. One wall of the study was covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the contents looking crumbling and old. But the other wall was full of shelves of identical glass vials. There were labels beneath them. I walked closer so I could read them.
Here the labels were neat and precise. Beneath each vial was a name and a number, written in the harsh block letters of the goblin language, and a thumbnail-sized picture.
“You can read Goblin, right?” I said to Obadiah. “I’m a little rusty. What do these say?”
Obadiah peered at the labels.
“Kyle Stevenson,” he read. “BD: 2/16/89. BP: Columbus, OH. Employer: Modell’s. GF: Tricia Hartly.” He frowned. “It looks like there’s more but it’s been crossed out.” He picked up the next vial.
“Jacob Humphrey. BD: unknown. Freshman NYU circa 2015. Part-time barista Starbucks 14th St. / University Place.”
He picked up another vial.
“Deshawn Washington. BP: Bronx, NY. Age: late twenties.”
There was something inside each vial, I realized, peering closer: a single strand of blond hair, a curly strand of black hair, what appeared to be a fingernail clipping, an eyelash. They were all suspended in some sort of liquid, a shade too dark and cloudy to be Elixir.
And then my eyes fell on a familiar face.
“Ramsey Cunningham. Age: late twenties. Employer: Union Jack’s New and Used. GF: Eva Morales.”
“That’s Eva’s ex-boyfriend,” I whispered. “The one Korvus impersonated. Oh my god—all of these guys are his different identities.”
“Are Quinn’s men here?” Obadiah asked.
I bit my lip. “Let’s search.”
We scanned the shelves of vials. It took a long time, squinting at all the photos pasted onto the shelves above each glass tube. All the handsome men started to look alike after a while. But then I saw it: one of the faces Quinn had sent me. Obadiah spotted another. I assumed all of Korvus’ disguises were unsuspecting mortals. They probably had no idea of the things he’d done while wearing their stolen likenesses.
“Well, now we know for sure it was him,” I said quietly.
“So what do you want to do now?” Obadiah asked. “I mean, we have proof, but not proof Reggie or the NYPD would ever believe. Do you want to steal the vials? Confront him with them? See if we can get him to talk?”
“No, I’d rather not have him know we were here. I need to find out what he’s doing with these girls he’s seducing. I mean, he’s stealing their X-factor for Elixir, but how? We should search his desk, see if we can find anything about his plans.”
We walked over to the mess of papers.
“If I were a megalomaniac, where would I hide my evil plans?” Obadiah mused, eying the stacks. There were so many piles of papers, notebooks and journals; I didn’t know how we were going to sort through it all.
“I guess just start at the top and keep going down, like an archaeological dig.” I sighed.
As I made my way over to the desk, I looked up at the drawings pinned over it. I realized on closer inspection that they were all portraits of the Queen. Korvus was a fairly decent artist. He lacked professional skill, and yet, there was a tender attention to detail in the sketches. He’d caught a hint of a genuine smile at the corner of her mouth that no official portrait artist had been able to capture. I thought I’d been the only one to ever see it, but perhaps Korvus had too. He’d known her for a very long time. Perhaps he knew her better than anyone else did?
“Look at these,” I said to Obadiah. “Who knew he could draw like that? They’re all of the Queen.”
“I guess that’s your favorite subject when you’re such a brownnoser,” Obadiah scoffed, but I shook my head.
“I think they’re rather lovely.”
Studying them, he bobbed his head in eventual agreement.
Wishing I’d brought gloves, I turned to one of the notebooks on the desk and gingerly flipped it open. This one contained text, written in a scrawling handwriting. I couldn’t read Goblin runes very well, but at least it was text. I stared at the scratchy letters, trying to put them together. I was about to ask for Obadiah’s help with the translation when the meaning sprang forth at me.
Slamming the book shut, I turned away. I was blushing again, but it was a different kind of shame this time. I felt ashamed of myself.
It was a poem. A love poem. And it was addressed to my mother.
“Obadiah, we should go,” I whispered. “This was a mistake.”
“What is it?” He caught my hand. “What did you just read?”
I handed him the notebook.
“He wrote this about my mother.”
Obadiah took the book from my hand.
He read silently, a faint flush of color coming to his cheeks. I could tell he felt the same way. We had pried into something that was absolutely none of our business.
“Good god,” he whispered, closing the notebook. “He’s in love with her.”
We looked at each other.
“I don’t think she has any idea,” I said.
“Probably not. She would probably never return his feelings if she did. Fairies hate goblins.”
“She thinks he’s just power-hungry,” I said softly, feeling almost bad for Korvus. I’d never seen him in such a light before. I’d always just dismissed him as an ambitious schemer. “She thinks all he wants
is the throne. But what if what he really wants is her?”
Korvus was a ruthless goblin who had kidnapped and killed kids, and was now sexually manipulating adult women, stealing their joy and derailing their lives. How could someone like that love anyone? And yet, his plan of stealing X-factor from living humans to manufacture Elixir made sense in light of what I’d just read. It wasn’t just to win over popular support of the Fey and make himself king. He was trying to save my mother’s life.
If he wasn’t such a bastard, I would have felt sorry for him.
“We should go,” I whispered to Obadiah again.
“Not so fast,” a voice croaked from behind us, and I jumped. “Good thing I decided to come home early from my work today, wasn’t it?”
Obadiah and I whirled around.
There, facing us, looking understandably furious, was Korvus. His hideous face was red, veins bulging from his gnarled neck.
“Korvus, I can explain,” I said, but what was I thinking? I couldn’t explain. He knew exactly what we were doing here.
“If you weren’t your mother’s daughter and she didn’t have her Eyes trained on us, I’d kill you right now for this,” he said.
I gulped. But then I stood up straight and tall and faced him. He might have a sad, unrequited crush on my mom, but what he’d done was wrong.
I looked him right in the eye, even though Obadiah clutched my hand in a silent warning to be careful. I pretended that I wasn’t afraid.
“Listen,” I said with mock confidence, “I know it was you behind all those men in the human world, the ones that seduced Quinn Sheffield.”
“Well,” he said, “if you’re going to disguise yourself, you might as well make yourself pretty.”
“What you did to Quinn was despicable. And how many other girls?”
“Oh, there were several. There’ll be more too.”
“This stops now,” I hissed at him.
“Why?” he said.
“Because I will tell the Queen. I’m her daughter; you piss me off, you piss her off.”
For the very first time I saw Korvus flinch. It was my wedge, my opening. He didn’t care what I thought of him, but he did care what my mother thought.
“You need to give those girls back whatever you took from them.”
“I can’t give it back. Once you extract such things from a human, you can’t return it. It doesn’t work that way.”
Something in his eyes told me he was telling the truth. My hope deflated. Was there nothing to be done for Quinn or the other girls he’d done this to? Could there never be healing?
“You’re despicable.” The words flew out of my mouth in my anger.
He rested his hand on his hip. “Despicable? Any more despicable than kidnapping and killing human children to accomplish the same end?”
“That was your fault too!” I yelled at him. But he was right. The alternative was taking the kids. Was it better? I thought of Quinn, lying in listless despair in her bed. She wished she were dead. But she wasn’t. The Queen’s captives would never wake up from their enchanted sleep. My confidence faltered.
“Not so black and white anymore, is it?” Korvus’ eyes sparkled with derision.
“They’re both wrong,” I said at last. “And they both need to stop.”
“And then all the fairies will die. Including your mother.” He looked straight at me, his features softer somehow. “Your mother is dying, Mab,” he said quietly.
“I noticed,” I whispered.
“Well, some of us find that unacceptable. Some of us are willing to do whatever it takes to save her.” Korvus’ passion turned to anger, and his eyes were cold. “Maybe you don’t care if your mother dies,” he shouted at me, “maybe you’re willing to just do nothing and let her suffer till the sickness takes over, but I’m NOT. I’m going to save her.”
I swallowed hard at a lump in my throat. Damn him, I couldn’t hate him for that. It was what I wanted too.
“I don’t want my mother to die either,” I said. “But there has to be another way, other than destroying the lives of all those women.”
“Seducing human girls and stealing their Elixir wasn’t my first plan, you know. I looked for a solution within the Vale itself first.”
“The Wolfmen’s streams?” I asked.
“I figured they could still change even if I diluted their streams a little bit. The Queen needed that Elixir more than they did. But it wasn’t enough. That’s why I had to seek out alternative sources. I’ve found much better sources in the human world. And procuring it is certainly more enjoyable.”
I scowled at him, resisting the urge to strike him across the face. Humans meant nothing to him. In his mind they were sources, not people.
Obadiah, who had been silent all this time, tapped his finger on the small of my back, a small signal to me, and I turned and looked up at him. His hand was on his knife. With the tiniest of movements, he threw his gaze towards Korvus. The meaning was plain. It whispered clear as words: I could kill him right now, if you want me to.
But I shook my head. The risk was too great. I might be furious at Korvus, but I couldn’t let anger make me stupid.
“Leave. My. House,” Korvus hissed.
I shot Obadiah a look, and we started to leave, walking backwards towards the opening of the study, keeping our eyes fixed on Korvus. I didn’t trust him not to kill us enough to turn around. But when we got to the steep flight of stairs there was no choice. We had to run, and hope we were faster.
We bounded up the stairs, all the way to the top, till my lungs were burning. But we didn’t stop there. The door slammed behind us, and we kept running, back to the main road.
The sunshine burned my eyes, wrongly bright after having been underground. The golden pavestones of the road gleamed and I leaned up against the tree to catch my breath, panting. Obadiah leaned against the bark next to me.
“That went well,” I said sarcastically, and he put his arm around me.
“Now at least we know for sure,” he offered. “If it was me, I would have killed him.”
“It’s not like he wouldn’t deserve it, but we can’t kill him—not yet. We don’t even know how many girls he’s stolen from. There could be dozens more Quinn Sheffields, hundreds. I don’t know if he’s telling the truth about not being able to fix the damage he did to those girls, but we have to try. We need to stop him from stealing from more women, but we also need to find out how many women he’s already gotten to, who they are and where, so we can track them down. I don’t think Korvus will talk to us, but if he’s dead, we lose him as a source of information. And we need to know everything Korvus knows. We need to think this through.”
Obadiah sighed.
“Let’s get away from here,” he said softly. “Somewhere where neither Korvus nor your mom can find us.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me. We need to alert the werewolves too, let them know that it’s not my mom who’s stealing from their streams.”
“I know where their camp is,” Obadiah said. “It’s not too far from my House Tree.”
“Then let’s go.”
I reached out, interlacing my fingers in his, and we walked together into the forest. His hands didn’t shake when I was holding them tight.
Chapter 10
We walked for a long way without speaking, and I didn’t even pay attention to the path. I just wanted to get away, wherever that was. At last I saw it, up ahead: Obadiah’s secret House Tree, the hideout I’d escaped to when my mother first broke the news to me of who I really was, the first place Obadiah and I had made love. I’d always have a fondness for this place, even though I’d spent one of the worst mornings of my life there, when I thought I’d lost him forever.
The House Tree looked much the same as I remembered it. Nothing much from the outside, no sign of a door. But Obadiah knocked his rhythmic pattern of raps upon the trunk, and the door cleverly disguised in the bark swung open. We stepped inside and began to climb the rou
gh, uneven steps. When Obadiah opened the door to the little bedroom, everything was just like I remembered: the bed carved into the wall of the tree, covered by velvety soft wolf pelts, the wide plank floors fragrant with the smell of pine. The little clay fireplace was dark now, but I knew soon we’d have it cheerfully glowing.
I squeezed Obadiah’s hand. “I remember the last time we were here.”
He winked at me roguishly. “We could have a repeat of that, you know.”
A little tingle ran through me at his words. “I’d like that.”
I leaned up on my tiptoes and kissed him full and hard on the mouth, delighting in the scent of him, the surety of his arms, the scratch of his stubble on my lips. I wanted to forget about everything except the feel of Obadiah’s body against mine.
He took off his leather coat and tossed it beside the bed. I did the same with my jacket.
I looked back and forth between Obadiah and the bed.
“As much as I want to be under the covers with you right now, there is one thing we should probably take care of first.”
Obadiah raised an eyebrow.
“Telling your werewolf friends it’s Korvus and not the Queen who’s been stealing their Elixir. Because otherwise they could be storming the Queen’s palace any moment now and it will be a bloodbath. I’m not sure I trust the Alpha to give me a month, like he promised me, as pissed off as they are. I don’t want Reuben’s friends to get killed any more than I want them killing my mother.”
“You’re right. I’ll go to their camp. They’ll spread the word to the packs in New York.”
He rose from the bed and began to get dressed again.
Obadiah must have seen me buttoning my shirt.
“I can go by myself; you don’t have to come,” he said. “Stay here in bed. You’ll be more comfortable. And as soon as I get back . . .” He winked at me knowingly, and I smiled, feeling warm inside. But I didn’t want to wait.
“I’ll come with you,” I said, continuing to button my shirt. “I don’t mind. And then we’ll head back together.”
“I think it’s best if you don’t come.” He frowned.