by Eva Chase
They must have been watching for traces of my hybrid light fae energy too. Closely enough that they’d caught on so soon after I’d left that they’d been able to figure out where I’d been leaving from.
I’d led our enemies straight to my king.
I pressed the gas pedal even harder. The van lurched forward with a fresh burst of speed. Something clanked as it fell over in the back, but Howard didn’t complain. Keevan gripped the inner door handle.
“I’m thinking we’ll protect Art a lot more effectively if we get there in one piece,” he said, shooting a plaintive look my way.
“Just keep your seatbelt on,” I told him. My fae senses were alert to every movement around the van. I sensed every opening a second before the cars even turned their signals on. I wasn’t letting us get into an accident, but I wasn’t going to let traffic laws slow us down either. I’d already stretched my awareness ahead of us to confirm there were no cops patrolling along this stretch of highway.
The new pouch of salt I’d stuffed in my jeans pocket hadn’t stirred. No dark fae or vermin had crossed the warning boundary I’d laid around the cemetery. I still had time.
A hill dotted with dark pines came into view up ahead. The cemetery was right on the other side. I swerved around another truck, ignoring the rude gesture the driver made, and tore along the open stretch of road ahead of me. Keevan let out a shaky breath.
“I guess if I ever need a getaway driver, I know who to call.”
As we came up on the cemetery entrance, I saw a couple other cars pulling into the drive—cars mounted with the fae hunters’ standard flood lamps. Jagger had summoned all of his colleagues to hold this ground.
I jerked my chin toward Keevan, and he pressed the talk button on the handheld radio. “We’re almost there,” I said. “Two minutes tops. Get Darton ready to run for the van. I’ll get him out of here, and we can figure out where we’re going after that once we’re no longer surrounded.”
“Sounds like a reasonable plan to me,” Jagger says. “I’ll let the guys with him know to be ready.”
I took the turn into the cemetery so fast the van skidded, tipping onto one set of wheels just for an instant. Keevan made a face like he’d swallowed a frog. We roared down the lane, turning left at the split.
The cemetery’s road only got us within a hundred feet of the mausoleum on the top of its grassy slope. Several fae hunter vehicles were already parked at the foot of the slope. I slammed on the brakes as soon as we reached the closest available spot and leapt out, snatching my wand from the cup holder as I went.
Jagger waved to me from the truck he was standing by. I nodded and started jogging up the slope.
Darton and a couple of fae hunters, one holding a flamethrower and the other an electro-gun, appeared at the entrance to the mausoleum. Cattle sod. I should have told Jagger that they needed to stay in the inner room, with all its barriers, until I reached him. The blood and ash I’d laid down wouldn’t stop the dark fae from reaching Darton, but it might have prevented them from figuring out exactly where in the cemetery he was.
Too late to worry about that now. Darton eased a step ahead of his companions, Excalibur gleaming in one hand, our bag of supplies slung over his other shoulder. I felt the moment he spotted me, his gaze snagging on me like a thorn on a sleeve. He blinked. An expression I couldn’t read crossed his face, his eyes widening and his jaw twitching as if he was somehow surprised to see me, but at the same time a faint flush crossed his cheeks.
I didn’t have time to puzzle out what be wrong. The pouch of salt shuddered so hard it nearly jumped out of my pocket. A wave of cold air washed over me, stealing my breath with its sharpness.
“Watch out!” I shouted, throwing myself up the slope faster.
Not fast enough. Shadowy bodies shot through the air toward my king so fast they were little more than streaks through the air. I drew in my breath to shout out a spell, and one of the dark fae had already slammed a fist writhing with dark magic into the face of the hunter holding the electro-gun. The other hunter raised his flamethrower, but two fae grabbed his arms, ripping the weapon out of them and hurling him down the slope toward me.
I dodged his tumbling body with a silent apology. “Shining shield, fend off the shadows!” I hollered, snapping my wand through the air. At the same moment, two of the dark fae threw a clot of churning darkness toward me. Our spells shattered against each other like a firework of light and shadow.
“Where did they come from?” someone was saying down by the cars. “How did they—”
Darton swung his sword. He caught the closest fae in the gut. A bolt of soul-driven light seared through the blade, and his attacker fell with a spasm. Darton whipped the sword to the other side, catching another. His arms moved with the weapon like they were one being, exactly the way he was meant to fight.
But even my king’s valiant soul and an enchanted sword weren’t enough to fend off a concentrated assault of dark fae. I shouted out another spell, and one of the fae still standing leapt in front of Darton to smash it. Another wrenched a shroud of shadow over Darton’s head from behind.
Darton slammed back with his sword, but the fae rammed a knee into his elbow, hard enough that I heard a bone snap from twenty feet away. His fingers flinched apart. The sword fell.
No. My king’s name caught in my throat. I spat out another spell, putting everything I had into the casting. A blaze of light swept forward from my wand. My nerves prickled with the life energy I’d expelled into it.
The wash of light careened toward the dark fae. In the instant it crashed into them, I could see nothing but searing white. Then several shadowy bodies reeling, two toppling with their heads between their hands... but no sign of Darton.
Panic rushed through my body, drowning out the thumping of footsteps on the slope behind me. I scrambled forward. My wand had burnt out with that last effort. I dropped its crumbling length and grabbed twigs from my sleeves.
As I snapped out spells to keep the dark fae disoriented, the fae hunters caught up. Flames and electricity blazed. The dark fae staggered away from our onslaught. With a series of faint pops that I felt in my eardrums, they vanished into the air.
Leaving nothing at all behind.
I stopped at the spot where my king’s sword and our bag of supplies had fallen. Excalibur lay in the grass, looking far too dull without his soul’s light guiding it. The ground was trampled with the indents of frantic feet. But there was no trace of Darton or the fae that had grabbed him.
The dark fae must have magically apparated away with him before my spell had hit. There was no way of telling where they’d jumped to.
My shoulders sagged. “Emma?” Jagger said, coming up beside me. I dragged a breath into my suddenly raw throat. The last of my twigs tumbled from my shaking fingers.
“He’s gone,” I said. “They took him. He’s gone.”
Chapter Nineteen
“We can tap into satellites all over the country,” Yasmin was saying. “The level of energy dark fae give off when they’re doing this amount of casting, we’ll always pick it up. We’ll narrow down their possible locations. I promise.”
The fae hunter seemed to expect some sort of answer. I made myself nod. She was perched in the bed of a pickup truck, computer open on her lap, a swirling map that didn’t mean anything to me filling its screen. I looked away from it across the cemetery. I couldn’t concentrate on anything in front of me for more than a second.
Darton. Arthur. My king. The dark fae would be carting him off to the Darkest One right now. She might not have reached this country’s shores yet, but light only knew how much of a head start they’d gotten on us. And we didn’t even know where they were now, where they were going—anything that might have given us a direction.
I pushed away from the truck, paced to the other side of the road, spun myself around, and walked back. Keevan was standing near the van we’d arrived in, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes even darker than
usual. Jagger watched me from where he was leaning against the hood of the truck. All the fae hunters were standing around, waiting to find out what we’d do next. Waiting on me. And I didn’t have a clue.
I’d never lost my king to the fae before, not like this. And when the dark vermin had overwhelmed us in the past, that had always been the end. I’d never been able to do anything other than give up.
But I couldn’t give up now. The fae would keep him alive. They needed him alive, for their lady’s plan to work, whatever exactly she meant to do with that dragon inside him. I had to keep my head, stay grounded. Pull all these people around me together.
I dragged in a breath and propped my arms on the side of the truck. The swirls I’d seen on the laptop’s screen before had condensed into several brighter dots speckling the western half of the country. Yasmin frowned, swiping her long bangs back from her narrow brown face.
“Those points of energy all formed at approximately the same time,” she said. “It takes a lot of magic to teleport like you said those fae did, I guess?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s one of the most tiring spells there is.”
“I don’t understand why they’d be scattered all over the place.”
I did. “The magic only works if you have an emotional tie to the place you’re jumping to,” I said. “Dark fae... they don’t get emotionally attached very easily. Most of them probably couldn’t magic themselves to anywhere except the place they consider their home ground. And the ones that attacked us had come from all over.”
But all from this side of the country. It wasn’t good, but it could have been a little worse. Okay, maybe I was grasping at straws.
“The one that took Darton apparated maybe half a minute before the other ones,” I said. “And it would have taken more energy for the fae to bring someone with him. Can you figure out where Darton ended up with that information?”
Yasmin made a face. “Unfortunately the readings only give us a general idea, nothing fine-tuned. We only just figured out how to detect magical activity at all in the last ten years. It’s a work in progress. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” I said. No, it was mine. I hadn’t made it back here fast enough. I hadn’t protected my king well enough. I’d failed, and this time there was no starting fresh.
This time, losing him might mean losing not just his life, but millions of others. I’d failed my oath too, or nearly so. Its itch scraped at the inside of my ribs, nagging me with a bitter pressure.
Jagger must have been listening in on our conversation. “We’ve got to come up with a plan of action somehow. Are there any other factors we could look at?”
I considered, tapping my fingers against the side of the truck bed. “Well, if they were being strategic, which dark fae tend to be, they’d have wanted Darton grabbed by the fae who could take him the farthest from here, so we’d have the most difficult time giving chase. But that’s assuming the fae who grabbed him is the one they planned to have do it. He did take out a couple with his sword first.”
Yasmin circled a few of the dots on her screen to highlight them. One at the farthest point south, another to the southeast, one almost due east from here, and one in the northeast near the border to Canada. “If they were following strategy, we’d bet on it being one of these.”
“That sounds about right.” Identifying those spots didn’t narrow down our options in any very useful way. The northernmost dot and the southernmost were a couple thousand miles apart. “We can’t split up to chase down all of those fae. Whoever finds Darton won’t have the manpower to get him back.”
“Let me look at overall patterns of movement across the last twenty-four hours,” Yasmin said. “Maybe that will give us more of a clue. They’ll be taking him to the lead dark fae you were talking about, won’t they?”
“Probably.”
She leaned forward to peer at the screen as her fingers raced over the keys. Several ripples creased the fainter swirls that still dappled the entire map. “Hmm.” She pointed to a ring of darker ripples in the northwest. “This is the movement we saw this morning, toward the cemetery. But here”—she gestured toward the Midwest—“there’s been a broader but fainter pattern of movement. It looks as if quite a few dark fae or creatures, or both, are gathering.”
She typed in something else, and the ripples moved. At the sight of them shifting across the map like surf on the ocean, my stomach tightened. Why would they be converging around the general area of—oh. Sodding hell.
I didn’t want to believe it. Maybe I’d read the map wrong. “Can you do some kind of analysis to see what point they’re all heading toward?” I asked.
Yasmin nodded. “We can’t predict perfect, of course, but with them coming from a few different angles, we can determine the general center point... Huh. Looks like they’re coming in toward Chicago. That’s an awfully populated area for fae to hang out.”
“Yeah,” I said, a rasp creeping into my voice. “That’s why they want it. That’s why the Darkest One wants it. It’s not just people. That World Peace Summit that’s been all over the news—it’s happening in Chicago. Leaders from all different countries...”
She wanted to destroy them all. Release the dragon and rip apart any pretense of peace. Leave dozens of countries scrambling without their leaders. All the pain, all the fear. She’d just drink it up, wouldn’t she?
She must be loving this modern world, where she could strike a blow to human life all across the globe in the snap of her fingers.
Keevan ambled over. “The Summit starts in two days,” he said. “So that means we’ve got two days to get Darton back, right?”
I blinked at him, and he grimaced at me. “I do pay some attention to current events.” At the sound of a car engine down the road, he raised his head. “Oh, hey. The rest of the gang is here.”
What? I glanced past him, and my heart sank. A car I recognized as Keevan’s parked behind the row of fae hunter vehicles. Izzy stepped out on the driver’s side, clutching the key. Keevan must have given her a spare for emergencies. I guessed this qualified. But I didn’t want to have to look her in the face and tell her I’d lost her friend and former boyfriend, the guy as far as I’d been able to tell she still carried a torch for.
Priya hopped out on the other side. The two of them strode over to us. “I called Izzy to tell her what was going on,” Keevan said, his tone defensive even though I hadn’t questioned him. My expression must have been tense enough to give away my discomfort. “I figured she’d want to know. And she was hanging out with Priya on campus.”
“It’s okay,” I said. Not really. Not at all. But at the same time, all three of them had been through a lot with Darton and me. They did deserve to know.
“What’s happening?” Priya asked as they reached us. “Have you figured out where the fae took Darton?”
“Not yet,” Keevan piped up, to my sudden gratitude. “We’re working on it. We have determined that this Darkest One lady is planning on blowing up Chicago while the World Peace Summit is on. And that’s how my life goes these days.”
Izzy rolled her eyes at him and turned her gaze on me. Her mouth was tight with worry, her hands balled in the folds of her flowing skirt. “Keevan said you don’t think they’d hurt Darton. He should be okay as long as we get to him in time?”
“Definitely,” I said. “The Darkest One needs Darton alive to use him the way she wants to.” Which didn’t mean her minions wouldn’t do him any harm at all. They’d at very least broken his arm in the attack. But Izzy didn’t need to hear that. The thought already weighed on me like a boulder on my back.
She raised her chin. “Okay. Okay. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. I know you’ll find him.”
Her certainty sent a jab of guilt through my chest. I wouldn’t have had to find him in the first place if I hadn’t lost him. But apparently she wasn’t blaming me.
“What have you got so far?” Priya asked. She sidled over to check out Ya
smin’s laptop.
The fae hunter pointed to the screen. “These points are our best guesses of which fae whisked your friend away. We’re still considering other possibilities for narrowing it down.”
Izzy and Priya’s arrival had diverted my attention. I focused it back on the map. “If the Darkest One is meeting the rest of her minions in Chicago, they’ll be bringing Darton there. So it wouldn’t make much sense for them to have taken him south. One of these two points would be most likely.” I motioned to the two points farthest east from us. “Unless they’re trying to throw us off the trail.”
“That doesn’t sound like the usual dark fae M.O. to me,” Jagger said. “Granted, you’ve got a lot more experience with them, but from what I’ve seen they tend to be awfully... direct.”
“Absolutely.” I pressed my hands together. “Okay. Let’s not sit around talking anymore. We head east, staying about halfway in between those points in latitude. Yasmin, you can keep checking the data for other patterns that seem meaningful. If we haven’t been able to—”
A chime sounded from the open van Keevan had left. It took me a second to recognize it. My new cell phone—a text alert. Who would be texting me? No one had my new number except the people standing around me...
And Darton.
I dashed to the van and hopped in to grab my purse. My hand shook as I pulled the phone from its pocket. Keevan, Izzy, and Priya hurried after me.
“Is it him?” Izzy asked. “Does he know where he is?”
“It’s from his number,” I said, my pulse hiccupping. “But it’s not exactly coherent.” He’d typed out Em followed by a short string of letters that didn’t form a word in any language I was familiar with. Other than my name, it looked like a butt dial more than anything.
But maybe that made more sense than anything else. “The dark fae probably didn’t think to check him for a phone. It’s not like they’re in the habit of kidnapping humans and having to worry about that. But he wouldn’t want them to see him using it. He must have tried to type something blind.”