Prince Charming Doesn’t Live Here

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Prince Charming Doesn’t Live Here Page 20

by Christine Warren


  Danice tried to absorb what he was saying, and while she thought she grasped the concept, she wasn’t quite sure why he felt it was important. “Okay, but what does that have to do with cell phones?”

  “Magic is just a form of energy,” he said. He sounded like a scientist trying to explain his latest invention; he really wanted her to understand, and he was trying to contain his excitement long enough to explain clearly. His voice held impatience, not with her, but with the fact that he had to resort to something as slow and tedious as speech to tell her about it. “Just like electricity is energy and light is energy and sound is energy. And cellular waves are energy. Frankly, the ley lines carry so much more energy than a cell tower can emit that it’s kind of ridiculous to compare the two. But obviously, the ley lines here in Faerie are allowing the cell signal to travel along them the way they would over the air to a cell tower.”

  Danice shook her head in disbelief. “Oh, obviously.” It seemed too weird to believe that magic would operate on such a mundane, human level as cell service.

  “Go ahead,” he urged. “I’ll bet you. Cash money. Try calling Rosemary. Right now.”

  She stared down at the phone, her thumb hovering over the list of pre-programmed numbers. She didn’t want to do it. Well, she did, but she didn’t. She wanted to find Rosemary so she could go home, so she could put this horrible assignment behind her and get on with the life she was supposed to be living. But at the moment, while the possibility existed that Mac was right, that this would all work and make that possible, she couldn’t quite bear to take that step that might prove him wrong. Until she pressed the button, she could believe him. If the call went through, the belief would be justified; but if it failed, the option would be gone. Right now, having options felt a lot more important to her than exercising them.

  “Niecie,” Mac prompted, breaking through the inertia of her indecision. “Make the call.”

  Taking a deep breath, Danice highlighted the correct number and pressed the send button. She held that breath while she brought the phone to her ear.

  “Well?”

  “It’s ringing,” she admitted, crossing her fingers. Inside her boots, she also crossed her toes. Just for a little something extra.

  “H-hello?”

  For a moment, shock paralyzed Danice’s vocal cords. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Hello?” the familiar feminine voice repeated. “Is anyone there?”

  “R-rosemary?” she finally managed. “Rosemary Addison? Is that you?”

  “Hello? Who is this?” Rosemary demanded, her voice quivering. “Whoever this is, help me, please! I need help.”

  With shaking hands, Danice pressed the speakerphone button and lifted her gaze to Mac’s. She held the phone out between them.

  “Rosemary, this is Danice Carter,” she said, raising her voice slightly to be sure the speaker picked her up. “I work for your grandfather, and I’ve been trying to find you for a week now. Where are you?”

  “I don’t know,” the young woman said, her voice breaking as she obviously fought back tears. “I-I was following someone. I just wanted to talk to him, but he disappeared through this weird cave and I went in after him, but when I managed to make it through to the other side, he was gone and I didn’t recognize anything! Before, I was in a park, but when I got out, I was in the middle of this forest. I kept walking and walking, thinking I’d get back to part of the park I recognized, but I don’t think I’m in the same place. Nothing here is normal, and I just want to go home!”

  She broke down crying.

  Mac swore softly, a sentiment with which Danice heartily agreed. It sounded to her as if Rosemary Addison really had managed to find her way into Faerie, probably through simple accident. But however she’d found her way there, now she was trapped, and Dionnu and his hunting party were out there looking for her with a significant head start over Mac and Danice.

  Mac leaned closer to the phone. “Rosemary, my name is Mac Callahan, and I’m a private investigator. I’ve been helping Ms. Carter look for you. We think we might know your general location, but we need you to help us find you. Look around you right now and tell us what you see.”

  Rosemary drew in a quivering breath. “Um, it’s dark out now, so it’s hard to see anything except the trees. I told you, I’m in the middle of the forest. Everything looks the same to me!”

  “I know you’re scared, Rosemary, but this is important,” Danice said, trying to make her voice soothing. It would have been easier had she felt a little calmer herself. “Just describe what you see. How far away is the closest tree? Are you sitting under one? Are there any rocks nearby?”

  “I’m, uh, I’m sitting on a rock. A huge one, like a boulder, but it’s flat on top, and it was warm when I first sat down. Now it’s getting cold. And I guess this is like a…a clearing, or something? The trees are all around the edges, like, maybe ten feet away in front of me. But they’re closer behind the rock. Like only two or three feet.”

  Danice watched Mac’s face, to see if any of this made sense to him. Then she remembered that he hadn’t grown up here, so he probably didn’t know any more about the geography of Faerie than she did. She leaned away from the phone and whispered, “This isn’t going to get us anywhere. I say we activate the GPS function and see if that works as well as the phone does out here.”

  Mac held up a finger to tell her to wait a minute. “Rosemary, was it still light when you found the clearing and sat on that rock?”

  There was a slight hesitation. “A little I guess. But it was getting dark again, and I’d been walking all day. I walked half of yesterday, too, without anything to eat, and I’m hungry, and I was tired. I needed to rest! I wasn’t finding anything anyway. I think I’ve been walking in circles the whole time.”

  “It’s okay,” he hurried to assure her, hearing the whining note in her voice. He must have guessed, like Danice, that the girl was near her breaking point. The last thing they needed was for her to start screaming or sobbing loud enough to lead Dionnu to her. They had to find her first. “You absolutely did the right thing. You needed to rest, and staying in one place will make it easier for us to find you. I just want to know if you saw the trees while there was still enough light to see the bark.”

  “I-I suppose,” Rosemary sniffled.

  “Okay, then can you tell me what the trees looked like? Were they rough and dark, or was the bark silvery and kind of smooth?”

  Danice frowned, seeing the look of intense concentration on Mac’s face. His questions were making it sound like he had a specific location in mind. Could he actually know where Rosemary was right now?

  “Silver,” the girl answered. “They were definitely silver. In fact, whenever the moonlight hits them, they look almost shiny. It…it’s actually kind of pretty, I guess.”

  Mac touched Danice’s hand. “I think I know where you are, Rosemary. I’ve heard of a place like that before. I’m not exactly sure of the way to get there, but I’ll find it. Don’t worry. We may have to try tracing your phone, so don’t turn it off, okay?”

  “O-okay.”

  Mac covered the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand and kept his voice low as he looked at Danice with excitement in his features. “There’s a sacred grove of trees to the northwest of the castle. It’s a species of tree native to Faerie with smooth bark, almost like birch trees, but they’re enormous, and the bark is distinctly silver and actually reflects moon-and starlight. And there’s a giant, natural stone altar at the western edge of the grove.”

  Danice felt the same excitement sweep through her. “Oh, my God, that sounds exactly like what she described.”

  He nodded. “I’m certain that’s where she is, but I’ve only heard of the place. I’ve never been there. I do know that the reason it’s a sacred space is because it’s one of only three places in Faerie where seven ley lines converge in one spot. If the GPS can point us anywhere, it should be able to point us there.”

 
Excitement took on a tinge of worry. “That seems like an awfully big chance to take when we don’t know if the GPS will really work. I have to end the call with Rosemary in order to activate the tracking function.”

  He hesitated only a second. “We can always call her back, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “What’s going on?” Rosemary asked, the fear in her voice rising once more. “Are you there? Are you still there? Hello?”

  “We’re here, Rosemary,” Mac assured her, “but we are going to have to try to use GPS to track your cell phone. To do that, we’re going to have to hang up with you.”

  “No!”

  “Rosemary, it will be the fastest way to find you. I promise.”

  “No! What if you get lost?”

  “We’ll be following the GPS signal. We won’t get lost.”

  “But you might. Maybe the trees will block the signal, and then I’ll die out here all alone.”

  Danice felt a twinge of impatience. “Rosemary, if we lose the signal, we’ll call you right back. I promise.”

  “If you lose the signal, how can you call back?”

  Mac grabbed the phone impatiently. “It’s a different signal. Rosemary, we can’t find you unless we hang up. But I promise we will. We’re not going to stop looking for you, okay? We’ll see you just as soon as we can.”

  He pressed the end button before the distraught young woman could offer any further protest. Danice winced in sympathy. True, Rosemary was bordering on hysterical, but if Danice had been in her shoes, in Faerie, lost and all alone, she couldn’t guarantee that she would have acted with any greater composure.

  Mac handed her the phone. “Activate the tracking function. We need to get moving. There’s always the possibility that Dionnu could have been close enough to one or the other of us to have overheard that conversation.”

  “Great, because I wasn’t feeling any pressure before.” Danice thumbed through the menu, searching for the correct application. “Cross your fingers, why don’t you? Just in case.”

  Danice herself would have crossed Baghdad naked at this point if she thought it would help.

  The phone’s screen went black for a second, and Danice felt her heart stutter. Then a digital map appeared with a compass at the bottom and seven blue lines intersecting at one particular spot in the top right corner. Superimposed over the point where they met was a blinking green dot. In the middle of the screen, another dot blinked orange.

  She caught her breath and pointed at the orange dot. “I think that’s us.”

  “Definitely.” He traced a finger toward the location of the grove. “It doesn’t look like we’re too far. Stop and listen for a minute. Tell me if you hear anything.”

  Danice drew her brows together and concentrated on the sounds of the forest. She heard insects and silence and an occasional birdcall. The kinds of things you’d expect to hear outdoors at night. She was about to ask what she was listening for when another noise caught her attention. It was faint, but constant, a kind of whooshing sound, like air from a fan, or…

  “Is that water? Like a river? Rapids, maybe?”

  “It’s a waterfall.” Mac tapped the screen slightly below and to the left of their dot. “Right here, see? Which means we’re facing almost in the right direction. We just need to head that way.” He pointed and turned to set off.

  Danice grabbed his arm. “Wait, how can you be sure? I can hear the waterfall, but I can’t tell exactly where it’s coming from, other than behind us.”

  “I’m half Fae. I can hear it. Trust me.”

  She looked up at him for half a second and nodded. “I already do. Let’s go.”

  They took off at a walk that quickly shifted into a jog. It was a compromise between moving quickly and making so much noise they might as well announce their presence with a heraldic trumpet. They didn’t want to give away their presence to Dionnu if he was nearby, but hopefully his party of Fae, hounds, and horses would make sufficient noise on its own to provide at least some cover. Danice still watched her feet, though, and tried to find the clearest spots for her boots to land, the ones without too many fallen leaves or brittle twigs waiting to snap sharply in the still night air.

  She kept one eye on Mac and one on the screen of her phone. It reassured her to see their orange dot moving slowly toward the green one. At least Mac had chosen the correct direction, and it comforted her to see the distance between the two points closing. But when this was all over, Danice swore she would never again go anywhere without sidewalks and taxicabs. And that was a solemn vow.

  Mac didn’t seem bothered by the rough going, and he made significantly less noise than she did moving across the uneven ground. His long strides also gave him an advantage in speed, even though she knew he was holding back to allow her to keep up. And that just rankled. After all, she didn’t run her ass off (literally some months) at the gym every day so that she could be left in the dust by a man when the moment called for speed. She didn’t care how long his sexy legs were.

  The longer they ran and the closer their dot came to the convergence of the blue ley lines, the faster they moved, until Mac began to pull ahead. Danice briefly considered calling out to him to stop, but at that point she was less worried about the noise factor of a shout and more worried about conserving her breath. They’d been running for at least twenty minutes, and twenty minutes over uneven ground while trying not to make noise and staring intently at a cell phone screen, she was discovering, took a lot more energy than twenty minutes on a nice, even treadmill while listening to an iPod and watching closed captioning on CNN.

  When she looked up and peered into the woods ahead of them, Danice thought she saw an opening in the trees. Then she spotted a flicker of moonlight, and she poured on a new burst of speed of her own. That looked a lot like a tree with reflective silver bark to her.

  Mac reached the clearing first, his long legs eating up the last few yards of ground before he broke through the inner ring of tree trunks and into the open air. Danice jogged up behind him and stepped around a tree to see a large, flat stone, like one of the fallen lintels of Stonehenge. Atop it, a lone figure quickly uncurled itself from a crouching position and stood.

  “Wh-who’s there?” Rosemary asked, and Danice felt such a surge of relief she actually felt her knees tremble a little.

  “It’s Mac and Danice,” Mac said, striding calmly forward to stand at the front of the enormous altar. “It’s all right now, Rosemary. I promised we would find you, and we did.”

  The girl choked on a sob and threw herself at Mac, knocking a grunt from him as she dove off the rock and landed hard against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her—out of reflex, Danice assured herself—and set her gently down in front of him.

  “Are you okay?” he asked kindly. “Are you hurt at all?”

  Rosemary threw her arms up and wailed, “Do I look okay to you?”

  Danice scanned the girl from head to toe and raised an eyebrow. First of all, she couldn’t think of Rosemary Addison as anything other than a girl, no matter how old she was. Her recent behavior branded her as a child—refusing to confide in her family about the man who had fathered her child, breaking appointments at the last minute, running off to another dimension without informing anyone of her plans.

  Second, the girl barely looked worse for the wear. Her skintight skinny jeans and cropped denim jacket had a couple of dirt marks here and there, and her trendy little booties had been scuffed beyond repair, but Danice couldn’t detect a single drop of blood anywhere on her. Her highlighted blond hair was mussed into disarray, but her skin looked smooth, tanned, and unmarked. As far as Danice could tell, Rosemary hadn’t even had to sacrifice a fingernail on her excellent adventure.

  Rosemary clearly disagreed. And she did so loudly.

  “I’m a mess,” she sobbed, her pretty, aristocratic features wrinkling up unattractively as she worked herself into a frenzy. “I’m dirty and I’m tired and I’m hungry! My hair is a
mess, my clothes are stained, my shoes are ruined, and I stubbed my toes on one of those stupid silver trees! And I just want to go ho-o-o-ooooome!”

  She threw herself back into Mac’s arms and continued to cry, pressing her face against his shoulder and clinging tighter than a barnacle. Mac threw Danice a helpless and slightly panicked look over the girl’s shoulder, to which Danice responded with an exaggerated shrug.

  His expression morphed into one promising revenge as he patted Rosemary awkwardly on the back. “Aw, you don’t have to cry. Sh. Please, stop it. We’ll have you back home in no time. I promise. Just hush. Come on.”

  “I want my mother,” Rosemary hiccuped, weeping like a three-year-old who had missed her nap. To Danice, she looked a heck of a lot more like a toddler than a mother-to-be.

  At the thought, her eyes narrowed.

  “Rosemary,” she began quietly, then sighed and repeated herself loudly enough to be heard over the other woman’s racket. “Rosemary, your grandfather told me that you said you’re almost four months’ pregnant.”

  Rosemary turned her head and sniffled in Danice’s direction. “So?”

  “So those jeans look awfully tight. Are they uncomfortable for you? We want to make sure both you and the baby are okay after what you went through.”

  The young woman pulled away from Mac and folded her arms over her chest in a defensive posture. She sniffled a couple of times, but the waterworks appeared to have stopped. Rather abruptly.

  “There is no stupid baby,” Rosemary snapped. “There never was. I’m not pregnant. I just said that because I was so mad at him!”

  Danice felt a wave of mingled satisfaction and fury. As soon as she’d actually seen Rosemary, the pregnancy story had struck her as fishy. The girl was as skinny as an actress. She should definitely have begun to show at this stage. Especially in clothes like that, so the satisfaction was for having guessed correctly. The fury came from the understanding that everything Danice had gone through for the last week, from the drive to Connecticut to the threats from her boss, the attack in the subway, and the imprisonment in Dionnu’s dungeon, had resulted from this spoiled girl’s inability to tell the truth.

 

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