by Eileen Wilks
Dis was physically congruent with Earth, but it wasn’t geographically identical. For example, the low mountains here at Clanhome correlated to an area of Dis that was mostly plains with a few rocky hills. That’s why Cynna had felt as if Ryder were ten feet belowground—wherever Ryder was, ground level was ten feet lower than it was on Earth at that spot. But while the topography of the two realms didn’t always match, the distances did. According to Cynna, the time should, too.
There were eighteen miles between Cynna and Cullen’s house and Lily and Rule’s place. Same should be true in Dis, which meant that Ginger and Weng would have had to travel eighteen miles after snatching Ryder in order to grab Toby at 2:20. So if time passed the same there as here, at the max they’d had forty-three minutes to cover those seventeen miles. Lupi could do that. Humans couldn’t, not without a vehicle.
Maybe they weren’t in Dis.
Lily wanted that to be true. She wanted it badly enough that she didn’t trust her reasoning, so she kept poking at her assumptions.
Cynna said that Ryder had been moving until roughly 3:00 A.M. She’d estimated the speed at between six and ten miles an hour. Cynna also thought Ryder had been lying down while she moved, possibly asleep because she wasn’t moving her arms or legs. Wherever Ryder was, then, something capable of traveling six to ten miles an hour seemed to be carrying her. A demon of some sort, probably.
At ten miles an hour, it would take almost two hours to go eighteen miles—way over the forty-three minutes that had actually passed. Therefore, either: (a) ten miles an hour wasn’t their transport’s top pace; (b) Ginger and Weng had used some other way to travel between the two houses; or (c) they weren’t in Dis.
Lily couldn’t see any way of determining the top pace of a completely unknown means of transport, so she considered Door Number 2. How else could they have traveled those eighteen miles?
A car seemed highly unlikely. She didn’t think one could be taken to Dis without a gate, and even if it could, she wasn’t sure it would work. Dis was a fairly high-magic realm, and magic wasn’t kind to technology. Maybe if they had a really low-tech vehicle, one that magic wouldn’t mess with too much . . . but were there any roads in Dis? She hadn’t seen any . . . wait. What if they used a vehicle intended to operate off-road? A dirt bike like the one Cynna was so enamored of, for example. Or an ATV, or a pair of them. Were ATVs or motorcycles low-tech enough to function in a high-magic realm?
She didn’t know. She made a mental note to ask Cullen about that when he got here.
If vehicles wouldn’t operate in Dis, that suggested the answer was behind Door Number 3: they weren’t in Dis. The time just didn’t . . . wait a minute. What if Ginger and Weng had gone back and forth between Dis and Earth?
Say they started in Dis, entered Earth just long enough to grab Ryder, and popped back into Dis. There they walked or ran until they were outside the area in Dis that corresponded to Clanhome. She knew they’d traveled at least that far in Dis because Isen would have felt the disturbance if they crossed back into Earth while still in Nokolai territory. He hadn’t.
So they cross back to Earth outside Nokolai Clanhome, where they’ve got a car waiting. Drive to Lily and Rule’s, leave the car, and hurry to the spot that correlates to Toby’s room. Cross back to Earth, grab Toby, then back to Dis.
Could they do all that in forty-three minutes?
She considered the road between Clanhome and home and the distance from Cynna and Cullen’s to the borders of Clanhome—specifically, to the road leading into it. Yes, she decided. It was just possible, if they ran instead of walking and drove like hell while in the car. They’d have had to be both fast and fit, but it was possible. “How much power does it take to cross realms?” she asked suddenly.
“I don’t know,” Arjenie said. “Why?”
Lily explained her reasoning. “That would mean they were popping back and forth between the realms a lot. It would be good to know if that’s even possible.”
Arjenie spread her hands. “I’m no help. I don’t think my father ever talked about that. He was limited in how much mass he could take with him when he crossed, but I don’t know if the limit was imposed by the amount of power it took to cross or by other variables. You think they’re in Dis?”
“I don’t know. The timing is really tight if that’s where they are, but the other realms all belong to the sidhe, right? The Two Queens would not make the Great Bitch welcome. She’d have to work through agents there, just like she does here. Dis is different. No one claims it but demons, and we know the GB can enter Dis using an avatar.”
“Her avatar got eaten, though, didn’t she?”
“Sure, by a demon prince, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s gone. It might mean the GB’s new avatar is a demon prince.”
Arjenie grimaced. “That is not a happy thought. And Dis is probably where Friar is, plus it’s the realm closest to Earth . . . though ‘close’ is the wrong word. The realms are separated, but distance isn’t a factor in that separation. But I’m told that Dis is the easiest realm to access from Earth.”
“Do you know why?”
“I think it’s connected to the fact that they’re highly congruent. Not topographically identical, from what you’ve told me, but congruent. Oh, and that’s something I was wondering about. Toby’s room is on the second floor, right?”
Lily nodded.
“So how did Tom Weng and Ginger Harris get there? It would be a huge coincidence if the spot in Dis—or wherever—that corresponds to that spot here just happened to be exactly one floor higher.”
“Oh. Right. I hadn’t thought about it.” So she did. “My memory from Harry . . . he thought they moved oddly. I think they were floating. Levitating. Tom Weng can levitate, and he and Ginger were holding on to each other. I’d guess he carried her up with him.”
“That’s really not good news.”
Lily glanced at her, puzzled. “Nothing today has been good news, but I don’t see how that makes things worse.”
“Well . . . it means they’ve got a Finder, doesn’t it? Or an unusually good Finding spell so they can locate their targets very precisely. But I guess you’d already thought of that. They knew which rooms held Ryder and Toby, after all.”
She hadn’t thought of that. She hadn’t once thought of it, and the realization hit her in the pit of her stomach. If she could miss something that obvious, what else was she missing?
* * *
LILY knew something had happened the moment she and Arjenie stepped into Isen’s house. It was quiet. Too quiet. She exchanged a look with Arjenie, then they hurried to the great room at the back. Cynna stood stock still near the big table, her fists clenched. Isen was on the phone, the house line. Rule was nearby, his phone in his hand.
She looked at him. “What?”
His eyes were dark with worry. He kept his voice low. “Isen just heard from Czøs. Lucas’s younger son is missing.”
Lucas was the Lu Nuncio for Czøs clan. His son would be the heir’s son . . . just like Toby. “When? Do they know when he was taken?”
“Very broadly. Sandy—the boy’s name is Alexander, but they call him Sandy—lives with his mother, who is on good terms with Lucas but doesn’t live with him. She called him about three hours ago and accused him of having stolen Sandy. He went to her house, where he discovered much the same situation we have—a missing child and the scents of two strangers, apparently human. Scent trails that come from nowhere and lead nowhere.” He paused. “Sandy is four years old.”
Shit, shit, shit. “Czøs Clanhome is in Minnesota. Is that where Sandy and his mom live? In Minnesota?”
“Yes.”
“That’s hundreds of miles from here.”
“Closer to thousands,” Arjenie put in. “Two thousand, to be specific, depending on what part of Minnesota we’re talking about.”
“But it’s too far! Ginger and Weng couldn’t get there that fast. Even if they came back to Earth and took a plane, they couldn’t get there that quickly. We must be talking about a different realm, not Dis—one where a point in Minnesota corresponds to a spot much closer to us—”
“We don’t know what we’re talking about,” Rule said flatly. “We don’t have a clue. Cynna says that Toby and Ryder haven’t moved from the place they were an hour ago.”
“Multiple teams after all, maybe?”
“Maybe. Isen, Lucas, and I have split the list of the other clans between them. Sam is too busy to pass word his way, so we’re calling. Their children—especially the children of the heirs—may be in danger.”
FOURTEEN
LILY woke up slowly, the nightmare reluctant to let her go. The horror of it clung like a spiderweb as she groped her way through the sticky remnants . . . she’d been eight years old again, locked up in the trunk of the car with Sarah. That part was familiar and drawn from memory. The next part, though, the bit with the knife—that had never happened. In the dream, her back had started hurting, and when she felt around, she found a knife stuck in it. It had been terribly painful to pull the knife out, but she’d managed.
Then the monster who’d kidnapped her and Sarah had opened the trunk, but this time she’d been ready for him. She’d jumped out and stabbed him over and over. But while she was killing the monster, she’d become an adult, and somehow it wasn’t Sarah who was with her, but Toby. Only when she looked around, Toby wasn’t there anymore. Neither was the car. And the body at her feet, the one she’d killed, wasn’t the monster. It was Dirty Harry. She was alone with the bloody remnants of her victim’s body . . . and she was in hell.
She shuddered, sat up, and scrubbed her face with both hands. Stupid bloody subconscious. Nothing subtle about it. “I get it,” she muttered. Toby was a little older than she’d been when she was kidnapped, but close enough to wake that old nightmare, especially since it was Sarah’s sister who was playing the monster in today’s version of Horror R Us. The dream hadn’t just been a recap, though. It had been set in Dis, the place where she’d died . . . part of her had, at least, and if that part had eventually been reunited with the rest, that meant she could remember dying. Dis was not a place she wanted to go.
And Dirty Harry? Why had she dreamed about killing him? She glanced at the empty bed beside her. Sometimes Rule understood the coded messages from her subconscious better than she did, but he was gone now—gone from the bed, the house, and Clanhome, according to her mate sense. They’d lain down together for a nap in the room that had been his back when he lived with his father.
She sighed. Probably the Dirty Harry part of the nightmare meant she’d better be damn sure she knew who the monsters were. Ginger Harris and Tom Weng were sure as hell acting like monsters, though. Did her stupid bloody subconscious disagree? Why would it?
No answers floated up from the uncooperative dark places in her mind. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to wake a few brain cells. She felt heavy, logy, as if someone had stuffed her with ten pounds of cotton while she slept, most of it in her head.
Coffee. Coffee was good at clearing out the cotton. Coffee and a shower, she amended, in that order, because she hated pulling dirty clothes back on after a shower, and she didn’t have . . . her eyes fell on a familiar backpack sitting on the floor beside the closed door, with her boots next to it. Draped atop it were jeans, undies, a T-shirt, and the leather jacket Rule had given her for Christmas last year. She’d only worn it a few times; leather wasn’t comfortable in San Diego.
Apparently she did have clean clothes.
She’d made a list of what she wanted to take during their last planning session. Looked like Rule had sent someone to the house to fill the order . . . or rather, she thought, checking more closely with her mate sense, Rule had gone to their house and sent someone back here with her stuff.
But he’d stayed there. Why? She frowned, shoved the sheet back, and got up. She grabbed her weapon, clothes, and phone and went to get clean. It was maybe a tiny bit paranoid to take her weapon with her when she was at Clanhome surrounded by lupi. She had no problem with that. Better a bit paranoid than separated from her Glock if she needed it.
No dworg attacked her while she stood under the hot water, however. She went ahead and washed her hair, wondering how long it might be before she could do that again. And thought about Rule, Toby, and hell.
Rule had urged her to nap, but he hadn’t intended to. She’d persuaded him to try and sleep on the grounds that needing less sleep did not mean needing no sleep, and there was nothing pressing for him to do. They were in waiting mode now. Waiting for Cullen to return; waiting for the dragons to tell them where they should go; waiting for gnomes to come build a gate to that destination . . . gnomes being the premier gate-builders, according to Sam.
Before napping, they’d held another planning session, one Lily had taken part in. Their preparations were based broadly on two assumptions. First, that the dragons would learn where the children had been taken. Second, that Weng and Ginger would know they were coming—and would have a trap or ambush ready and waiting.
And that, of course, was bad. You didn’t want to do the very thing your enemies expected. But they had no choice. Gates could only be opened on nodes. Tom Weng was a sorcerer; he’d know where the nodes were and would either have them watched on his side—whatever realm that lay in—or would set some kind of magical boobytrap. Or both. What they really needed was a way to surprise the bad guys, but none of them had come up with a way to do that.
Lily sighed and shut off the shower. How long had she slept? What time was it?
She dried herself quickly and grabbed her phone to find out. She learned it was past four in the afternoon of a very long day—and that she’d received two texts and three voice mails during her nap. She scowled. She hadn’t slept so hard that her phone wouldn’t have woken her. A quick check explained why it hadn’t. The sound was off.
No doubt Rule had wanted to make sure she wasn’t disturbed. That was not his decision to make, dammit. Quickly Lily skimmed the texts. Pete’s confirmed that the backpack held the things she’d asked for—socks, undies, ammo, and her first aid kit, among others. Her sister Beth wanted to know what was going on. And the text from Rule didn’t tell her a damn thing about what he was up to—just that he’d sent her assault rifle to the spot at the foot of Little Sister where they were staging some of the supplies.
Food and water and first aid stuff they had in abundance, so two sets of that had been assembled, with one set left at each of Clanhome’s two accessible nodes. They didn’t know which node would be used for the gate, so they were trying to be ready to leave from either one. The staging spot at the bottom of Little Sister was as close as they could readily come to a halfway point.
Lily pulled on her clothes and brushed her wet hair, then braided it quickly while listening to the first voice mail, the one from her father. He loved her; he was sure they’d get Toby back; he and her mother stood ready to help in any way possible. The next voice mail was from the Air Force colonel she was supposed to be working with. He wanted her to call him.
She wasn’t going to. She’d called Ackleford earlier and handed that particular investigation over to The Big A. She’d called Ida, too, since she lacked any more authoritative contact for Unit 12. Someone needed to know that the only investigation Lily would be handling right now involved the kidnapping of children using magical means.
Five children taken—at least that had been the count when she’d lain down—and all of them except Ryder the son or descendent of a Rho. Toby, at ten, was the oldest, followed by Diego, the eight-year-old grandson of Ybirra’s Rho; four-year-old Sandy of Czøs; Ryder; and a three-month-old baby named Noah, whose grandfather had been the Etorri Rho until his death nine years ago. They’d been taken from Canada, California, New Mexico
, and Minnesota. All over the bloody continent, in other words.
Ryder was the only girl the kidnappers had taken. Since she was the only female lupus ever born, that wasn’t surprising. She was also the only one who’d been living in a clanhome. Clanhomes were in some nebulous way imbued with a clan’s magic, which repelled the Great Bitch’s magic. Her agents were able to physically enter a clanhome, but crossing into a clanhome using her power would alert the Rho, as it had Isen, and would probably take a lot more power.
They’d spent that extra power in order to grab Ryder, hadn’t they? That had to be significant. Unfortunately, Lily didn’t know why.
The continent-wide kidnapping spree might mean that Ginger and Weng weren’t the only ones kidnapping kids, which would not be good news. Multiple perps capable of crossing realms on a whim—and taking others with them—was not a happy thought. The alternative was that they weren’t operating out of Dis, after all. If Ginger and Weng were the only crossers, they’d have to have been crossing to and from a realm that wasn’t physically congruent with Earth, so that a point there which aligned with western Canada was right next to a point that aligned with Arizona.
If so, that left them with no idea where to go. Not unless the dragons came up with a destination . . . which they obviously hadn’t, Lily thought. Not yet anyway, or someone would have woken her.
Isen had sent lupi to the other three crime scenes to see if the scents left behind matched those of the intruders here. He should have heard back from the one headed to New Mexico by now. Lily twitched with the need to go find out. First, though, she sent Ackleford a quick text telling him to call Colonel Abram. Only then did she listen to the last voice mail. The one from Ida. Dread and hope mingled in her gut. This was surely about Croft . . .