by Lisa Shearin
I had every intention of listening.
I glanced over at Kitty and Kylie. Both women were standing utterly still. Kylie was white as a sheet and her breathing had quickened.
So it wasn’t just me.
With his hackles up, Yasha cautiously skirted the wall until he was beside the opening. His growl was so low it was more of a vibration in the air. No barking to signify either Fomorians or Janus, but growling was good enough for me. Yasha might not have known what was down there, but he didn’t like it one bit. I tossed a questioning glance at Kitty.
The portalkeeper was frowning.
Kitty was the expert, I was the newbie, and we were both confused. There was something else we agreed on without the need to say one word—the need to get out of there. Now.
There was evil beneath this place, beneath this island, evil that was laid on thick enough to make our collective skin crawl. It could be Fomorians or it could be the evil spirits the local Indian tribes had been so afraid of. You didn’t walk into a dark hole in the ground unless you were qualified to handle what you found—or what found you. Anyone other than a seasoned battle mage would be woefully—and fatally—unqualified.
We got the hell out.
31
“WHAT was that?” I asked when were safely back outside. While out here might not be any safer than in there, at least we had sunshine.
“It wasn’t a portal,” Kitty said.
With Roy’s help, Kylie shakily lowered herself to a cracked stone bench. I squatted down to Kylie’s eye level so she wouldn’t have to move. “Did you sense Ian?”
She shook her head. “Ooh, bad idea,” she breathed.
“Dizzy?”
“And then some.”
It was definitely more than dizziness. The dryad looked like she was about to be sick.
“I don’t know if what I sensed was Ian,” Kylie panted, “the danger that Ian is in, or how Ian feels right now. It just hit really hard.”
Kylie’s voice was a bare whisper. She was so nauseated that even speaking was an effort.
While it could have been any of the above, it was probably the latter. Janus’s ghouls had sprayed something in Ian’s face to knock him out. And to prevent Ian from escaping, fighting, or putting up any kind of resistance, Janus was probably keeping him drugged and sick, and thereby helpless.
Something else Janus was going to pay for.
Kitty sat next to Kylie, her arm around the dryad’s shoulders, helping to hold her upright. Yasha sat on the ground on her other side, leaning against her leg. Kitty was trying to keep moving to an absolute minimum, including breathing as smoothly as possible so as not to move the shoulder Kylie’s head was resting against. I had been this sick before. It’d been on a plane. Too sick to live pretty much described it.
Dryad physiology was similar enough to humans, so I’d given her one of my Dramamine. It would take the edge off of the dizziness and nausea, but it would take time to work.
“Honey, we need to get you back to the dock,” I told her. “Why don’t you let Roy carry you? You don’t need to be walking.”
The dryad gave a huffing breath that was meant to be a laugh. “I don’t think I could if I had to.”
Yep, Janus would definitely be paying for that.
Roy bent and lifted Kylie into his arms as gently as possible, keeping her movement to a minimum. The little dryad laid her head against his chest and closed her eyes as Roy walked as smoothly as he could down the path back toward the dock.
We’d only been walking for a few minutes, when Rake came running toward us. He must have sensed that something was wrong. I jogged forward to meet him, so Kylie wouldn’t hear what I was about to say.
“Janus must be keeping Ian drugged. Kylie sensed him and is sharing the sickness.”
Rake glanced at the pale dryad curled in Roy’s arms and his look was pure murder.
Yep, when Janus showed his faces tonight, there was a long line forming of people who wanted to bash in each and every one of those smarmy mugs.
One of the Trust representatives had caught up to Rake. The poor guy was gasping for air. He saw Kylie being carried and his eyes widened.
“Vertigo,” I told him. “She gets it from time to time.” I turned to Rake. “You about ready to go?”
“We’ll be at the dock in ten minutes,” Rake told our host. He took my hand. “Come back to the castle with me. There’s something I want you to see.”
• • •
What used to be the interior of Bannerman Castle was now open to the sky.
I didn’t need to get any closer to know where those ley lines intersected—in the exact center of those towering, teetering walls. We were standing on the outside of those walls looking in. The outer ruins of the walls had been braced with some kind of telescoping metal poles to keep them upright. If or when they fell, more than likely they’d be falling in. That was the reason we were staying out. There were several arched doorways that had been part of the original structure. The doors were long gone, but we didn’t need doors; we needed to see inside.
A gust of wind swept across the river, and I resisted the urge to back up, way up. A good storm wind could bring them down. But black magic strong enough to break a four-thousand-year-old curse and usher back a race of monsters?
There wouldn’t be a brick left standing.
And Ian—and everyone who would be in there trying to rescue him—would be buried in the rubble.
“It’s a miracle these walls are still standing,” I noted with disgust.
“I felt the ley lines loud and clear, but I wanted a second opinion.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Did the spearhead react when Kylie did?”
“Not a peep. Tell you the truth, I’d forgotten that I’m even carrying the thing. Maybe it needs direct contact with Ian.”
“Maybe,” Rake said, but his attention was elsewhere. He was squinting at something past the weeds and briars, a lot of which was waist high on me.
“I didn’t see that before,” he murmured.
“What is it?”
Rake didn’t answer. He quickly walked down a path that’d been cleared through the brambles, a path that ran parallel to the shortest of the castle walls, which was still at least a story and a half. Rake stopped when he got to an opening that let him see to the center, and whispered a curse.
I caught up with him and looked where he was looking.
My blood ran cold. I was glad we’d gone to the house earlier. If we’d come here instead, Kylie would have seen this.
This end of the island was covered with fallen stone from the collapsed section of the castle, with piles of stone scattered haphazardly around the ruins.
Not all of the stones had been left where they’d fallen. Some had been gathered and carried to the center of the ruins.
And stacked into an altar.
• • •
The trip from the island back to the marina was quiet.
Rake and I told Roy what we’d found. Rake had made a quick trip inside the walls to get a better look at that altar. The undergrowth around the altar had been very recently trampled by whoever or whatever had stacked those stones. Before we’d boarded the boat, Roy had called Alain Moreau to report. By the time we pulled away from the island’s dock, our commando teams were on their way.
Rake and Roy chatted with the Bannerman Castle Trust representatives in the front of the boat, while Kitty and I stayed with Kylie. The dryad was stretched out on one of the bench seats, Yasha at her side.
She was getting some of her color back as the Dramamine took effect. As far as the Trust people knew, Kylie was having a bout of vertigo. Which, considering how she felt, wasn’t too far off the mark. As her head began to clear and she could think, Kylie believed that part of what she’d sensed had been Ian. It ha
d only lasted for an instant, but it’d been long enough.
“Can you describe where he was?” I asked.
Kylie started to shake her head then groaned at the movement.
“That’s okay, sweetie. You stay still. I’ll take that as a no.”
“It was dark and cold,” she managed.
I sat back, fighting the urge to punch something. Ian was somewhere deep in the interior of that island.
Rake had in turn asked our hosts about tunnels on the island. Yes, they’d told him, there were tunnels and even some caves. And from what we’d sensed in the Bannermans’ kitchen, one of the ways to access those tunnels was through their root cellar. Though Ian was too important to Janus to risk keeping him in one of the caves. Janus would have had a pocket dimension there. But with the ley lines intersecting in the castle ruins, Janus had to bring Ian to the surface tonight. And when he did, we would be waiting for him.
Even though Kitty and I hadn’t found a portal to that pocket dimension, Kylie’s experience had given us all the confirmation we needed that Ian was there.
And so had the altar.
Kylie hadn’t seen that, and I wasn’t going to tell her. Rake and I had agreed that was need-to-know information, and Kylie most definitely did not need to know. The people who needed to know did know, and they were on their way here to do something about it.
It was mid-afternoon, and the campers, hikers, boaters, picnickers, and general tree-loving city folk looking to get out of the city for a day were about to have a lot of heavily armed company.
32
SPI was having a company picnic.
Grilling wasn’t allowed in Hudson Highlands State Park, which was located right across the river from the island, but that hadn’t stopped our commando teams from enjoying one heck of a spread. Though it had to be the most solemn picnic in the history of this or any other state park.
The food had been cooked in the city—and brought here—by Bill and Nancy Garrison.
Bill and Nancy were the owners of the Full Moon, a slice of Southern hospitality down the street from SPI headquarters. It was a meat lover’s paradise where the steaks were rare, the barbeque tangy, and the iced tea had enough sugar in it to make a spoon stand straight up.
Bill and Nancy were from the barbeque mecca that was my home state of North Carolina.
They were also werewolves, as were three of their staff who’d come with them—their office manager, the bartender, and Bill’s assistant pit master. The bartender was still young as werewolves went, and was wearing warmup pants and long sleeves to hide his impending furriness. The rest were old and mature enough to hold it together at least until after dark.
Five werewolves hosting a picnic for mostly supernatural commandos a few hours shy of a full moon.
Yeah, that was probably a first for any state park, too.
Roy had wanted his and Sandra’s teams here in plenty of time to go over how they were getting to the island, approaches to the castle ruins, and any opposition they were likely to encounter. I could think of one large opponent in particular, but Roy didn’t seem too concerned about the kraken. Since he was in charge of this operation, I was glad he had a plan for dealing with or, more likely, avoiding it.
Gathering that many people in a state park called for a reason that’d be believable to anyone who might happen past. Food always worked. And considering what these people would be doing tonight, they needed a good meal before they did it. A few of the Hudson Highlands park rangers were elves. They had been contacted and told that we would be in the park tonight. It helped to have good friends in leafy places. Hiding nearly two dozen military types in plain sight was almost as difficult as hiding werewolves in broad daylight; yet right now, our people were doing both.
Alain Moreau was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, sunglasses, and an actual baseball cap. I almost didn’t recognize him.
Even though Moreau was in the shade on the other side of the clearing our people had claimed for their own, I still lowered my voice because vampires had better hearing than even goblins. “How’d you talk him into letting you come up here?” I asked Bill and Nancy.
“Two of Roy’s boys were having lunch when the call came in,” Bill said. “We knew what had happened to Ian, and that the teams were waiting to hear where he was being held. We asked the boys where and they told us. They probably shouldn’t have, but they didn’t see the harm. When we called Alain, we didn’t tell him how we found out, and we assured him we just wanted to help. We’ll stay here with the vehicles to make sure they’re here when y’all get back. Wouldn’t be the first time an enemy tried to sabotage an exit.”
“And since we were coming, we told Alain that we would bring food,” Nancy said. “These boys and girls need to eat.”
“Can’t storm the castle on an empty stomach,” I agreed. “Moreau didn’t tell you to stay away?”
“He said he would prefer it if we did.”
“And you told him you’d prefer to come.”
“That’s right.”
Bill glanced out over the Hudson River and grinned. “I’ve always had me a taste for seafood.”
“There’s some exotic eatin’ in there,” I warned him. “And big.”
“I’ve always been an adventuresome diner. Twice I brought in the biggest catch at the Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament. My best was a six hundred pounder. I’ve always enjoyed a good fight.”
It wasn’t like Bill didn’t know what a fight was. He’d been stationed down at Lejeune. Before he and Nancy had moved to New York, Bill had been a Marine master sergeant, and Nancy’s dad had been his CO—a dad who raised his kids like Marines.
Nancy laid a hand on my arm. “Sweetheart, we consider Ian one of our own. If there was anything we could do to help, you know we’re going to do it. And now I’m especially glad we’re here so we can take care of Ian’s girlfriend.”
Nancy had immediately taken charge of Kylie, who was now asleep in a nest of blankets in the back of the Garrisons’ Tahoe.
What could I say? I had to say something or well up with tears again. I swallowed. “Thank you. I know Ian will appreciate it. He won’t like you putting yourselves anywhere near danger, but he’ll appreciate that you’re here and looking out for Kylie.”
Nancy smiled and patted my arm.
Bill beamed. “And when he’s back I’ll grill him the biggest and best steak he’s ever had in his life.”
“In the meantime,” Nancy said brightly. “Can I fix you a plate?”
• • •
SPI commando Calvin Miles was armed for Fomorian. He didn’t have magic, but he had plenty of muscle—and heart. Yesterday morning, Alain Moreau had assigned Calvin and Liz to guard Ian, and Ian had been taken by the very creature they’d been tasked with protecting him from. I was Ian’s partner, and I had felt the same sense of failure, but there was a big difference. I wasn’t a commando; no one expected me to be able to protect Ian from anything, let alone a warrior mage from an ancient race of supernatural sea monsters. Heck, Ian had been assigned as my partner to protect me. No one expected me to run to anyone’s rescue.
“It’s our job to rescue, to protect,” Calvin said quietly after he finished his third burger. “Me and Liz, we didn’t do our job.”
“There was a four-inch-thick fire door followed by a closed and locked bank vault between you and Ian,” I reminded him.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I suppose it also doesn’t matter that the entire setup had been a trap to get Ian inside and keep everyone else outside, and that Janus had been planning this for years.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“And that the thing doing the planning is some kind of supersorcerer, and was the right hand of the Irish god of blight and destruction.”
“Nope, doesn’t matter. We still failed.” Then Calvin looked at m
e and smiled for the first time since Ian had been taken. “But we’re gonna make up for it tonight.”
• • •
A massive—and thankfully familiar—figure strolled out of the trees toward Alain Moreau. That he was instantly the target of every commando in the clearing didn’t faze him in the least.
Vlad Cervenka.
“Stand down,” Moreau called out. “He’s a friendly.”
“I don’t know if I’d say that, Mr. Moreau,” Vlad told him. “I do know that for tonight we have the same enemy.”
For the time being, Yasha had dispensed with pretending to be a German shepherd, and came forward to shake his friend’s hand.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Ambrus Báthory has paid you to retrieve his First Relics.”
“As did the heads of the Frontino, Ruthven, and Tepes families.” The vampire shrugged. “If I’m collecting one box, what’s a few more?”
“Does Mr. Báthory know about the others?”
Vlad shook his head. “And the others don’t know about him. My business is my business. There is no reason to tell them.”
I nodded in approval. “Get paid three times for doing the same job.”
“More, actually.” Vlad had a military-style duffel bag slung over one huge shoulder. “I intend to get all of them, contact the owners, and negotiate a fair recovery fee.”
“Enterprising,” Moreau said.
“I’ve never been opposed to extra income. Though I did tell my clients that if they entrusted me to get their property back, I would recruit my usual expert help.” He jerked his big blond head back toward the trees where he’d come from. “The heads of the families are familiar with the quality of our work. My team is staying out of the sun.”
“Youngsters?” I asked.
Vlad grinned. “Just saving their strength for the job. They are conscientious workers.”