And what if Vincent Faye had kidnapped his own daughter? It seemed unbelievable, but what if he had taken her? Would Cecelia have been missed by outsiders? She’d been four years old. How many friends did she have outside her house? Did she go to playschool? And even if he had kidnapped her…why call the Guardians and ask for help? And yet, if someone in his family wasn't involved, how had the kidnappers moved through the wards?
I knew less than I should have known about kidnappers – the only kidnappers I deal with regularly are the Faerie, who play by different rules – but they always had a profit motive. Vincent Faye should have received a demand for money by now, or perhaps some other concession, but he had heard nothing…or had he? It wouldn’t be the first time a grieving parent had kept negotiations a secret from the police – they would have been told that informing the police would mean certain death for their child – but I doubted that Faye would have been that stupid. He had made his money through taking advantage of opportunities. He also knew that others thought the same way.
“Idiots,” I muttered.
I concentrated and teleported home. The house was dark and silent, but it felt far more welcoming than Maxwell’s house, naturally. I checked the wards and was relieved to discover that Aylia had done nothing more incriminating than having a bath, getting dressed in Varsha’s old nightgown, and climbing into bed. I felt a quick flash of guilt at having spied upon her, but there was little other choice. I had to know if I could trust her. I went into one of the side rooms, an empty room I never used, and pulled the Pixies out of my sack. They looked to have survived the trip, so I poured them some water from the tap – Pixies should never be allowed near any alcoholic drinks, as one sniff of the barmaid’s apron sends them crazy – and checked their food, before leaving them there. They’d be able to survive the cage for one more day.
“Bed,” I said, firmly. I stumbled into my room and didn’t bother to undress before I went to sleep. The night was, thankfully, dreamless.
***
I woke up later in the morning and checked on the two girls. They seemed to have become friends of a sort – they were both happily together in the library – and so I took the time to undress and take a long bath before I donned a dressing gown and walked downstairs. It had been a gift from a friend years ago and I liked to think that I looked impressive in it, although Varsha and a couple of girlfriends told me I looked a bit overdressed. They didn’t understand style when applied to me, of course!
“You’re back,” Aylia said. She sounded relieved. I wondered vaguely if she’d told Varsha about the kiss, but it wasn't something I could ask either of them. “There was a news article this morning on CNN about the house catching fire and burning down and we were worried.”
“Interesting,” I said. I wouldn’t have thought that Maxwell was that important, although it might have been a case like Poison Pen Penny. Penny had been a gossip columnist in Washington and, when she finally died, thousands had gone to her funeral, just to make sure that she was actually dead. “What did they actually say?”
I took the remote and clicked on the television. CNN runs a constant stream of Washington news these days and it was only a few minutes before we caught the story. The reporters knew nothing, of course, and blamed the whole thing on an alchemical experiment that had exploded and destroyed the whole house. I watched, seriously tempted to write the reporter a letter of rebuke – he managed to mix up all the terms and claimed that Maxwell had been a powerful sorcerer, rather than an alchemist – before the channel switched to an interview with a Senator, who was using it as fuel for the anti-magic fire.
“This horrendous accident proves that magic should be carefully regulated to prevent the loss of innocent lives – further innocent lives,” he thundered. “What regulations existed to prevent the alchemist” – at least he got it right – “from experimenting in a Washington suburb? The President should take action to prevent sorcerers and wizards from risking the lives of America’s…”
I switched it off, irritated. I had known, of course, that Congress and the Senate was considering legislation to challenge the growth of magic and the supernatural, but I doubted that it could become practical. The Guardians and the War Mages, and perhaps aided by the Knights Templar, if Congress swallowed its pride and asked for help, couldn’t take on every other magic-user in America, let alone the world. The bloodbath would be horrendous. Our worst nightmare was the more…extreme magic-users getting together as an organised force and this would provide just the incentive they would need.
“They’re just talking, aren’t they?” Varsha asked, as she produced my breakfast. “They can’t get laws like that passed…?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It wouldn’t be like the ban on wands and wand-related magic; that ban had been about as useful as banning thinking, or even smoking. When anything from an umbrella to a baseball bat could be used as a wand, what was the point? It had merely provoked laugher. Harsher laws would have to be enacted and enforced…and they couldn’t be enforced. It would produce contempt and anger, a dangerous combination. “If that happens, I think half the Guardians would resign.”
Aylia gave me an odd look. “Would you?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. Varsha had cooked a good breakfast, as usual, but it tasted like ashes in my mouth. Just what was everyone saying about New York? It hurt to admit as much, but I didn’t know what I would do. The only thing that kept me in my position was my sense of duty. “Change the subject, please.”
We finished eating in an uncomfortable silence. When we were finished, Varsha took the dishes, while Aylia and I went into the library. She'd been reading some of the books, I noticed, feeling a flash of irrational rage. Books had been friends longer than anyone else, but if I knew Aylia by now, she’d been the same; the books were undamaged. I checked some of the titles and smiled. She'd been going through the books of speculation and making notes.
“So,” she said, taking a seat and crossing her legs, “what happened?”
I had to drag my eyes away from her face. It was open and vulnerable. “I searched the house,” I said, shortly. I wished, not for the first time, that I could trust her completely. There were ways to confirm that someone was telling the truth, but how could I use any of them without losing her trust? “When I was there, someone killed Maxwell and escaped.”
Aylia blinked. She was genuinely surprised…or, perhaps, a good actress. “They killed him while you were there?” She asked. “Isn’t that a remarkable coincidence?”
“Yes,” I said, grimly. She had raised an interesting point. Had Maxwell been killed because the mystery woman had sensed my presence? I didn’t think so – she could have taken a shot at me as well, unless she hadn’t been confident of victory – but it remained a possibility. The other possibility was that Maxwell had completed his urgent tasks and had suddenly become dispensable. If she was playing for such high stakes – and no one would pay out millions of dollars for shits and giggles – she would probably have no hesitation about removing him. “I think that we need to go looking elsewhere for answers.”
“I agree,” Aylia said, slowly. “Now tell me, where do we go now?”
I’d already decided the answer. “Tell me something,” I said. “Have you ever been to Mirkwood?”
“The magical wood?” Aylia said. She frowned, as if she tasted something bad. “Dad never took me anywhere near it when I was young. He always said that it was too dangerous for a young girl and wouldn’t explain why. I think he took Alassa once…”
She paused. “Are you going to ask the Centaurs?”
“No,” I said. I wouldn’t have asked them Centaurs anything unless I had run out of all other options, including deciding it didn’t matter any more and abandoning the hunt. They’re not easy to deal with. In some ways, I’d be happier dealing with the Faerie. At least they had the grace to look alien. “I was thinking that we might look up a werewolf clan.”
“Why…?” Aylia asked,
and then caught herself. “We’re going to Felincia’s clan?”
She was quick, I realised – again. “Yes,” I said. I paused at her expression. “Is that a bad thing?”
“I don’t know,” Aylia admitted. She looked down for a second. Felincia had been a friend as well as a bodyguard and a servant. “I used to talk to her and…she used to say that she’d left them for a reason, but she wouldn’t be drawn on why. Do you really want to talk to them?”
“I think so,” I said. There were other reasons, apart from the obvious. One of the materials Maxwell had stockpiled had been Wolfsbane , known as Aconitum to the scientifically inclined, which only had a handful of magical uses. Most of them involved werewolves and other lycanthropes. It was worth investigating until Dolly got back to me. I held out a hand. “Shall we go?”
Aylia took it. “Why not?”
With some effort, I could probably have thought of a few answers, but there was no point. We dressed properly – and I packed a handful of silver weapons, just in case – then teleported out of the house and into the intense heat of Mirkwood.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Into the woods, and out of the woods, and home before dark!
-Into the Woods
I suppose it was inevitable that Mirkwood would get its name.
It used to be called Yellowstone National Park when the world was sane. I never went when I was a child, which may not have been a bad thing. The people who did know what it was like used to break down and cry when they saw what it had become after the magic flowed into the world. Yellowstone National Park, a place where there were few human settlements, was a natural place for the supernatural. The magic flowed through the land and twisted everything. The only thing that remained the same was Old Faithful – the geyser – and a persistent series of earthquakes.
And thousands of magical creatures called it home. There were werewolf clans running through the woods, centaurs striding majestically and showing off to human females and far more, including creatures that we barely knew anything about. The entire region was impassable unless you had an army of heavily-armed men, or powerful magic. We kept a close eye on it, but everyone tacitly agreed that if something did go wrong in the area, there was nothing we could do about it. Anyone stupid enough to walk into the woods at night deserved everything they got.
We flickered into existence on the edge of the woods, near the small bungalow belonging to Guardian Granny. Granny was a retired Guardian – she looked around eighty and was, in fact, fifty – and the current supervisor of Mirkwood, the person who handled most of the dealings with the supernatural creatures. Some of them, the werewolves in particular, sometimes want to engage with the outside world, while others have to be convinced to remain inside their territory. Granny had been one of my trainers while I’d been in training and I still respected her. I also needed her permission before we wandered into her territory. I didn’t want her thinking that we were in trouble and charging to the rescue.
Granny sat on her front porch, swinging backwards and forwards on a rocking chair. It was a deceptively peaceful pose. I could feel the twisting magic surrounding her and reaching out over the entire area, watching for trouble. Granny had always taken a more contemplative approach to magic than most of the other Guardians, considering it far more than just a tool. Her writings on the subject were required reading, although I had to admit that they didn’t always make sense to me. She talked about magical interactions at very high levels, speculating that all supernatural creatures were linked in some way, but I couldn’t understand how they were linked.
She had been handsome, rather than beautiful, in her early years and she still maintained a striking appearance. She was the kind of grandmother who would do what was right, not what felt good, and would walk right into the Gates of Hell themselves to rescue her grandchildren, or stare down a uniformed thug without breaking a sweat. She might have looked far older than she was, but there was nothing wrong with her mind, or the pair of sharp eyes she turned upon us as we approached her. She probably had already heard the rumours, but looking at the pair of us, she would know that there was something going on.
“Guardian Glass,” she said. Her voice was soft, but without any hint of weakness at all. She had once – or so the story went – frightened off a demon by giving it a hard look. I could believe it. “What brings you to my humble abode?”
Before I could answer, she looked at Aylia. “And Aylia Faye, I see,” she added. “I don’t think that you will find your sister here, young lady, but the experience might do you good.”
I frowned and tried to steer the conversation back to where I wanted it to do. “We came here to find a werewolf clan,” I said. One of the problems with werewolf clans was that they knew themselves by scent. There were no clan names, nothing like the Scottish or Irish clans, nothing that could be used to identify them to fallible humans. “A girl called Felincia left them to become a bodyguard to Vincent Faye and his family.”
“Ah,” Granny said. She picked up a piece of knitting from her lap and stared at it thoughtfully. The magic twisting around the wool told me that it was far more than a simple piece of baby clothing. Granny has hundreds of relatives and loves them all. “That would be Davan’s Clan, then. Felincia was his second wife’s third child.”
I nodded. Werewolves tended towards having large clans and families; they don’t seem to remain with one mate all their lives, switching around at will. Their clan heads have some rights over the females, as I understood it, but the clash between ancient and modern clans has been going on for years. Felincia might have left with his blessing, or…perhaps she had fled the clan. There was no way to know until we found the clan itself.
“I believe that they were last seen nearby,” Granny said, thoughtfully. “They’re one of the more settled clans, so they remain near their villages and don’t roam that far from their lands. They’ve been having problems with some of the hunting clans recently, even to the point of having adopted guns to threaten them away from their homes. I have been wondering if we should step in and offer to keep the peace.”
“It might be a bad idea,” I said. “They might just unite against us.”
“That would still be unity,” Granny pointed out. I shrugged. Werewolves have a code of honour that bears no resemblance to anything humans have developed, except perhaps in bad fantasy novels. They don’t fight mass wars for territory; they fight small, intensely personal wars for dominance. They’re more like a pack of wild dogs than humans, although they would be insulted by the comparison. Unlike the Pixies, they have human-level intelligence most of the time. “Still…”
She reached into one long pocket and pulled out a Guiding Star. The small talisman seemed to glow with magic, lovingly infused into the gold by a careful mage who loved her work. Granny, I realised suddenly, had created it herself to aid in her work.
“Here,” she said. “The Guiding Star will lead you right to her clan. It’s about an hour’s walk from here, but I’d advise against using a car or even teleporting into their village. It upsets the centaurs and…that time is coming around again.”
I scowled. “I understand,” I said. “Thank you for your help.”
Granny shook her head. “Thank me after you come out again,” she said. “Just remember to stay on the paths and you should be fine. Don’t go running into the woods or the spiders will get you, if nothing else.”
She waved to us as we walked out of her garden and onto the road leading into the woods. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before, even in Germany or Russia; it looked as if the entire area had been abandoned by humanity for thousands of years, creating a world that was both completely overgrown and in perfect harmony. It had sprung up over the years since magic returned to the world, blurring with the trees and plants that had been in the area already to create a new world, with no place for humans. I felt the Guiding Star pulling at me, tugging me down the road, and yet…I was already tempted to forget the
quest and just run. The sense of threat was growing all around us.
Aylia took a long breath. “Tell me something,” she said, as something large and powerful crashed through the woods only bare meters from us. I couldn’t see anything, but a shadow under the trees. “What did she mean by the centaurs and saying that it’s that time again.”
I frowned. “You remember when your father refused to take you here?” I asked. She nodded angrily. “He had a point. This place includes the largest gathering of centaurs in the world, as far as we know, with hundreds of them living in the wood. Didn’t he tell you anything about the facts of their lives?”
“No,” Aylia said, shaking her head. “We were never encouraged to even think about them. They just weren’t important.”
“I suspect he meant that they wouldn’t talk to him,” I said. There was no way to know, of course, but Vincent Faye wasn't interested in abstract science. “The important thing to remember about the centaurs, Aylia, is that there are only male centaurs. There are no female centaurs and never will be.”
I caught her arm as she stared at me. “They can’t breed for themselves,” I said. “Instead, they wander through the woods near human settlements and call out to those who will hear them. You know how some girls go mad over ponies? They feel the same attraction to the centaurs, so when they call, they come. They have sex with the centaurs and become pregnant, always. They end up carrying one of their babies.
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