by Jane Kindred
Polly picked up her drink and held it out for someone to fill, and in seconds, a waiter appeared at her side to do it. “You needn’t worry about Oliver, dear. He’s special. I haven’t conscripted him, merely linked with him.” She fingered the solitary pearl in a silver filigree cage that hung from a delicate chain at her throat. Lucy had the distinct impression she was looking at the physical manifestation of Oliver’s kiss.
“Linked?” Oliver and Lucy repeated the word together.
“Oliver’s magic is unique.” She smiled at him. “You’re a natural protector. I’m rarely in danger of physical harm because my gammon are so loyal. But a little extra protection never hurts.” She sipped her drink. “I mean, it might hurt you, and for that I apologize, but it is your nature. What’s one more little undergrounder under your protection?” Polly winked.
“You’re telling me that those chest pains I was having, that pressure and shortness of breath that I thought was a heart attack...that was your pain?”
“Oh, no, sweetie. I think I’ve misled you again. A link to me isn’t simply a link to me. It’s a link to all that I am. You’re linked with the entire Grotto.”
Lucy took Oliver’s arm as his face clouded with anger. “We should probably get back to Colt, don’t you think?”
After a deep breath that seemed like he was swallowing his rage, Oliver nodded. “My apologies for leading those idiots here. Let’s hope there are no similar incidents in the future.”
Lucy steered him out before Polly could toy with him anymore—or with her. She’d narrowly missed Oliver finding out about Finn and her out-of-control hormones.
As they drove back to Jerome, it turned out the miss was narrower than she’d hoped.
“What were you doing at the Grotto Sunday afternoon? Was that where you were when I called you about the Henderson interview?”
“I was just getting some information from Polly.”
“I thought you were all about not giving anything to the siren.”
“Well, it wasn’t information, exactly.” Lucy felt her cheeks growing hot. “I was just looking for someone, and she pointed me in the right direction. No token required.” She hoped he wouldn’t ask for whom. She felt his gaze on her for a few moments longer, but he didn’t press her.
Delectably Bookish was dark and quiet, the way they’d left it. Oliver went into the guest room to check in on Colt but came back out into the hallway abruptly.
“What’s the matter?” Lucy glanced at the door. “Is he awake?”
“He’s gone. And Darkrock took him.”
Chapter 19
“How do you know it was Darkrock?” Even knowing Colt wouldn’t be there, Lucy looked around Oliver into the room. “Maybe he just woke up and ran off.”
“Because they left this.” Oliver held out his hand, a small black pebble resting in his palm. “It’s their calling card. They staged that entire goddamn thing at Polly’s Grotto just to get to him.”
“Are you sure? How would they even know about him?”
“They must have been keeping a closer eye on me than I thought. Jesus. I’ve been such a colossal idiot.”
Lucy rubbed the back of her neck. “If you’re right about how they found you, this is my fault. I think I must have a mole at Smok Biotech.” Thanks to Lucy’s suspicious nature, Darkrock now had knowledge of an entire paranormal underground it could seek to exploit—and had taken a young boy to be tortured. She noticed Oliver wasn’t exactly rushing to absolve her. “I’m sorry. I know that’s inadequate. I had no idea my research department was vulnerable to Darkrock operatives.” And she intended to do something about it the minute she had a free moment.
Oliver was watching her speak, but she had a feeling he wasn’t listening to her. “Maybe we can use Smok’s influence to get Colt back.”
“Smok’s influence?”
“You said Darkrock had tried to arrange a partnership in the past.”
Lucy drew her hand away from the back of her neck, curling her fingers into a fist at her side. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Darkrock was using Lucy’s vulnerability to Oliver and his to Colt to force a partnership.
“No way am I joining forces with those assholes.”
“You don’t have to join forces with them, just make it seem like you’re willing to. Make them an offer, anything to get them to hold off on whatever plans they have for Colt. Maybe tell them you had plans for him. Or, hell, tell them the truth, that you want to send him back to hell. It’ll probably be more effective if you can keep me out of it, anyway. Let them think we’ve had a falling-out because you disapprove of my sympathy for inhuman creatures.”
Something was off between them, and it wasn’t just that Colt was gone. It was as if something had wedged its way between them since they left Polly’s. Or maybe at Polly’s. Maybe his connection to Polly had done something to sever theirs. He was bound to the Grotto through a piece of his soul. Or maybe it was Lucy. She’d screwed up with Colt at the storage facility, and now she’d screwed up by leaving him here. And as open and vulnerable as Oliver had been with her, she’d insisted on playing things close to her vest. Were they actually having a falling-out? And, dammit, when had she fallen so far in?
Oliver voiced her worry. “And it wouldn’t exactly be untrue, would it? You don’t approve.”
“It’s not that simple, Oliver.”
“At least they haven’t hurt him yet.” He still wasn’t listening to her. “I’d feel it if they had. Please do what you can. What you think is right. In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can find out where they’re holding him.”
“What are you going to do, try to bust him out by yourself? They’ll probably have him in an armed facility.”
Oliver’s gaze focused fully on her at last. “You know where it is, don’t you? You know where they’re holding him.”
“What? Why would I know?”
“You’ve dealt with them before. Smok must have information on their sites in the area.”
“That doesn’t mean I automatically know where they took Colt. I have no idea where their holding facilities are. I’m not just walking around with all of my company’s resources in my brain like I’m hooked up to some kind of neural net.”
“But you can find out. In minutes, I’m guessing.”
“Oliver—”
“Is there some reason you don’t want to give me that information?”
“Oliver. I’m on your side here. It just isn’t that simple.”
“It is simple. You could make one phone call right now and get a map of every site they own in the Southwest.”
Lucy swore and took her phone from her pocket. “All right. I’ll see what I can find out. But you’re acting like this is some kind of conspiracy against you—like I can just magically find Colt for you and I’m refusing—and I have no idea why.”
After walking away from him for a few minutes to talk to her assistant and give her Oliver’s email to send him everything on Darkrock’s properties, Lucy put the phone away and turned back to him. “My assistant is on it. She’ll send you anything she can find. But this isn’t like swinging a magic pendulum over an enchanted map. They have dozens of operations, and I’m sure there are plenty of black sites Smok has no way of knowing about.”
“It’s a start. Thank you.”
Whatever had come between them was still there, like an invisible field of mistrust. Maybe seeing what Lucien was and extrapolating it to Lucy had hit him on the drive home.
And maybe Lucy had lost her damn mind and let her hormones convince her there was something between them in the first place. She’d never bothered with more than the occasional hookup, and there was a reason for that. Sex was a release valve, something that was useful every so often so she could go back to concentrating on what was really important. Relationships were unnecessary complications t
hat distracted her from her work. But Oliver had been right. It was more than just sexual between them. And that had been her big mistake.
Lucy slipped her phone back into her pocket. “I’d better get going. My assistant reminded me of several clients I’ve been neglecting.”
Oliver’s expression was inscrutable. “It’s three in the morning. I thought you were going to sleep here.”
“I told you, I don’t sleep.”
* * *
Lucy was keeping something from him. Over the past twelve hours, he’d forgotten who she was, letting desire—and the fact that he’d felt it again for the first time since he’d lost Vanessa—cloud his mind.
Oliver fiddled with his ring as he sat in the kitchen drinking coffee in an attempt to get a little clarity. What Artie had said at the Grotto had gotten under his skin. Vanessa would be ashamed of him. Not because he had compassion for people who weren’t fully human but because he’d lost sight of his personal integrity. Lucy Smok and Smok International were inseparable, and he’d allowed himself to forget that.
He still couldn’t even be sure that Darkrock finding him hadn’t been part of her plan. They could all be playing him. Except he didn’t really think that of her. What the hell was his problem?
The ring gleamed at him again as he turned it. Semper Fi, the motto of the Marines, was engraved on the inside. It had been Vanessa’s and his promise to each other: they would always be faithful, always stand by each other, always have each other’s backs. And the knowledge that he hadn’t had her back on that last mission ate away at him like a slow-acting corrosive agent. They had argued about the mission beforehand. Argued a lot beforehand, in fact.
Vanessa had talked about getting out, and Oliver was dead set against it. Despite his misgivings about Darkrock’s overall mission, he’d thought they were providing a useful service. They were getting lowlifes off the streets—both human and otherwise. And fewer predators on the street was a good thing, even if Darkrock wasn’t entirely ethical in how they went about it. Vanessa had talked about going into business together, a private enterprise where they offered their services on a consulting basis, setting their own terms. Darkrock was too much like the military, too much unquestioning loyalty, with someone else always calling the shots.
The night they’d gone to the meth-and-blood lab, Vanessa had given him an ultimatum: Darkrock or her. He would have chosen her. He had to believe that deep down, she’d known it. But he was too stubborn to let her “win” the argument. Even though he’d already been privately questioning his loyalty to Darkrock, he wasn’t going to let her push him into making a decision. They’d argued on the way there. She’d announced that she was pregnant, and Oliver had accused her of doing it on purpose.
And ten minutes later, a vampire lord had smiled at him with Vanessa’s blood on his lips and told him how delicious it was to get two for the price of one. That was when Oliver had burned the place to the ground. Vanessa was lost, and he couldn’t let the bastard drink from his child who would never be born. And the possibility that the bloodsuckers might keep Vanessa’s body alive to incubate not only her own fresh blood but also their child as a blood slave was horrifying.
Even then, it hadn’t been a conscious decision. He’d told Artie he’d used incendiary tear gas to ignite the fire. But it had been Oliver himself. His rage had shot out of him like chaotic energy, sparks of uncontrollable grief and fury catching on everything in sight. Without an accelerant or an incendiary device, Oliver had called the fire through some primal, unconscious power he hadn’t known he possessed. And tonight, the siren had told him what it was.
The same thing that gave him the power to absorb the injuries of the underground folks in his “territory”—something he’d unwittingly laid claim to that night three years ago with his promise of protection to the young pickpocket—had given him the ability to manifest his rage through external control over the element of fire. Polly had told him who his father was, showing him with a touch of her hand on his. Images had come to him in a flash, a vision of a dark green place by the sea. He’d always known his father had been Welsh. It was the only information he’d gotten from his grandparents—the reason they’d refused to take him in was his “Anglo” paternity. He just hadn’t expected his father to be the ruler of the Welsh Otherworld—or a son of the ruler of the Welsh Otherworld, at any rate.
Son of Gwyn, Polly had called him when they first met. Gwyn ap Nudd was the king of the Ellyllon, the Welsh elven race, and Oliver’s father was apparently one of Gwyn’s numerous offspring. And his father, Oliver had seen in Polly’s vision, had been there at his birth and had kissed Oliver’s head “with fire,” as Polly put it. It was the reason for the reddish highlights in his otherwise dark brown hair from his mother’s side. His mother, consequently, had gone mad. Or maybe they’d just believed she was mad if she’d made any claim to have been impregnated by an elven prince. The vision hadn’t told him that, but it seemed like a reasonable assumption.
Oliver set down his cold coffee and pushed back his chair. This was too much to deal with right now. Not unsurprisingly, his head felt like it was on fire with all this knowledge. He’d spent the past five years cultivating a practice of daily meditation to keep from burning anything else down, not knowing how he’d done it in the first place, and if he didn’t stop thinking about it, he’d end up setting his own house ablaze.
He could kill two birds with one stone. Sitting on the floor of the room where Colt had last been, he cleared his mind and let go of his anger and his guilt and tried to let his mind fill with unconscious knowledge. Lucy’s assistant had sent him the list of Darkrock’s properties, and he meditated on those, letting the locations float by in his mind—Bagdad, Skull Valley, Bullhead City, Quartzite—not assigning any significance or judgment to them, as if they were meaningless.
But they weren’t meaningless. He opened his eyes. Blackstone Ranch in the desert south of Golden Valley near Bullhead City on the Nevada border was the site of the compound where Darkrock had trained Oliver’s unit. The compound, three hours west of Jerome off I-40, had supposedly been decommissioned afterward.
He took the pebble out of his pocket. Darkrock had left him a small black stone. They’d wanted Oliver to know. Colt’s abduction served more than one purpose. They wanted Oliver back, and Colt was their leverage.
* * *
Lucy had changed clothes in her car once more before leaving Oliver’s place. Her go bag had never gotten more use. It was time to get this job done. Something Theia had said had gotten her thinking. Not about the flaming man eating her heart—because what the hell?—but in the dream they’d shared. She’d mentioned that Leo Ström had a wolf aspect. And while Rhea had worked on Lucy’s dream tattoos, Leo himself had brought up Fenrir, the giant wolf destined to swallow the sun—or the world; she could never remember which—during Ragnarök. She doubted this thing was Fenrir, but it was definitely something otherworldly.
She just hoped she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t sleeping tonight. She’d solicited Leo’s help before to track the beast. As the chieftain of the Wild Hunt, he had a direct line to a well of knowledge about the murderers, sexual predators and “oath breakers” in the region. Who better to help her catch a malevolent, murderous energy that presented itself as a wolf than the wolf aspect of the chieftain of the Wild Hunt?
Lucy texted Leo’s number, hoping she wouldn’t be waking him up. A minute later, he replied. He was, in fact, on the Hunt tonight. It was the usual season. Lucy had forgotten. Odin’s Hunt normally rode during the period between the late harvest and Yuletide, though Leo, as a mortal chieftain, had the power to call up the Hunt at will.
In moments, she heard the blast of the hunting horn and found herself sitting in the midst of a freak winter storm at the base of Cleopatra Hill. Roiling clouds and thunder and lightning ushered in a hailstorm that pelted the soft top of her little Alfa Romeo Spider, and t
he thundering of hooves soon distinguished from the atmospheric thunder as Leo and his entourage emerged from the clouds.
She stepped out of her car when Leo slowed, while the rest of the Hunt thundered past them into the hills.
“How do you manage to ride a phantom horse if you’re not a phantom?” she asked as he dismounted and tipped his cowboy hat at her. In keeping with the setting, his Hunt had taken its inspiration from the Western “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”
“Everyone contains a phantom self. Most people just keep theirs locked up at night in their dreams. My hugr, my thought-self, is awake when others sleep, even though it no longer leaves my body as it did when I was immortal.”
“So...your thought-self inside your mortal frame is what’s keeping you on the phantom horse?”
Leo grinned. “If that makes sense to you, then, yes. I don’t even understand it.” He patted the horse-that-wasn’t-a-horse and rubbed its nose. “Your message said you’d thought of something I had that might help you track the beast.”
Lucy nodded. “I’m not sure if this is an indelicate request, so please don’t be offended if I’m way off base here, but Theia mentioned that you had a wolf aspect, as well.”
Leo removed his hat and ran his fingers through his permanently tousled light ginger hair. “You think my wolf has something to do with this monster you’re hunting?”
“No, sorry. I didn’t make myself clear. I was hoping I could...borrow your wolf.”
“You want to borrow my fylgja?”
“If your fylgja is your wolf-self, and if you’re not using it—and if this isn’t totally rude of me to ask—yes.”
“It’s not rude. I’ve just never been asked to lend out part of myself.” Leo shrugged. “I don’t see why not. But how is it going to help you?”
“It’s your harbinger, if I understand correctly. A representation of your essential spirit that’s intimately connected to you and your fate that presents itself to others.”