“And between here and work? No. Any wards can be breached.”
“Right. And yours are stronger than mine? Hell, Killarney Village is practically a ghost town.”
He reached out and grabbed my arm. The world swam in front of my eyes, then everything went black.
Chapter 16
Oriel’s house had everything needed to sustain life. Water, and food in a magical pantry that kept cold things cold and hot things hot. A magical stove. A luxurious bathroom, including a pool large enough to swim in, and a sauna. A library, a pool table. No internet or phone service, though, and no TV.
I awoke alone and had no idea how long I had been asleep. Oriel wasn’t there and didn’t make an appearance for five days after I woke up.
I couldn’t leave. The windows and doors wouldn’t open, and the door to Oriel’s shop didn’t open either.
I didn’t know what had been in the closet where all my clothes were stored before he moved me in. Maybe the closet hadn’t even existed then—Fae magic was so strange and reality bending. But every stitch of clothing and all the shoes that I owned, which honestly wasn’t a lot, had been transported from my apartment to Oriel’s home.
Even though I searched his entire house, I couldn’t find anything that I had in the invisible box in my apartment. The box that contained my extra weapons, extra passports, money, and the book. I was a little curious about that. Either he hadn’t looked, or my magic was strong enough he couldn’t detect the spells hiding it. Or maybe he wasn’t strong enough to break the spells. I would never know, since I had no intention of asking about it.
My mood went from shocked disbelief to pissed off, to sad and lonely, to screaming rage. It finally settled into cold anger. Oriel made the mistake of leaving me the ruby pendant and my weapons. I laid magical alerts and traps on all of the doors and windows. I couldn’t get out, but I was damned if he was going to get in without me knowing it.
I vacillated between wanting to slit his throat or beat him to a bloody pulp. I swore that the chances of him ever again laying a hand on me unshielded were non-existent.
Under different circumstances, my stay could have been enjoyable. His home was as nice as the fanciest hotel rooms, but magical. The food was great, the hot tub, the sauna, and the swimming pool were lovely. The garden around the pool was like being outside in late spring.
The library was extensive—the size of my whole apartment. I found a lot of interesting reading material in English, French, German, and Spanish, but that was less than a quarter of the books and scrolls. At least half of the books were in Elvish, which I couldn’t read at all.
Shortly before sunset on the fifth day of my imprisonment, the alarm on the front door tripped. I was in the kitchen fixing myself a snack and immediately dropped what I was doing, grabbed my sword and my dagger, and ran through the house. I arrived just as Oriel stepped through the door. His face met my fist, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes.
His body lay in the entranceway, propping the door open. Not wanting to get trapped in the house again, I leaped out the door. Standing on the large stone that served as a front porch, I looked back.
Oriel was in his natural Unseelie Fae form. Blood ran from his nose, but he was lucky I’d pulled my punch. Then I realized that one punch didn’t account for the bruises on his face, the dried cut on the side of his head, the cuts and tears of his clothing, or the dried blood on them.
He looked like he had been in a brawl and got the worse end of it. Dumbass. Served him right. Locked me up to protect me? What made him think I couldn’t protect myself? I could probably protect him better than he could.
With a groan, he rolled to his side but didn’t open his eyes. I was a little relieved that I hadn’t killed him. I looked around but didn’t see his car. If he had parked it in the garage, he would have come through a different door.
No one was out on the street, not that I expected to see anyone. Other than a few half-breeds, only witches and mages who were partnered with Fae were left in the Village. There wouldn’t be any humans. The only place they came was a small shopping area on the border between the Village and Westport.
Deciding I could use the exercise after being cooped up for five days, I got ready to take off on foot when another groan from Oriel attracted my attention. In addition to the blood on his face from his nose, a pool of blood was spreading from the area of his belly.
Crap.
Standing astride him, I bent over and pulled his shirttail up to reveal a four-inch cut a little to the right and below his navel, but above his hip bone. A quick inspection showed that he was bleeding freely and the wound extended into his bowel.
Double crap.
Oriel still had the Hunter’s dagger in a sheath on his belt. I jammed it into the door to keep it from closing, then pulled his body through the doorway, picked him up, and carried him into the bathroom. As I stripped him, I found three other cuts from a sword or a knife, and at least a dozen bruises. Searching through the cabinets, I found some bandages and tape—bought from a human pharmacy—and some potions labeled in Roisin’s handwriting in both Elvish and English.
I poured one of the potions into his wound, another one in his mouth, getting a perverse pleasure on nearly choking him, then another one in his mouth. I washed him off, bandaged his wounds, then carried him into the adjoining room, and laid him on a couch there.
If the last potion I gave him affected him the way it did me, then he would be out at least the rest of the day. I gathered my weapons, blocked the front door open so I could get back in, and set off to try and find Lizzy’s dad.
I was always a little disoriented in the Village. Part of that was the chaotic—or perhaps I should say, unstructured—way everything was laid out. All of the materials were natural stone and wood, and the architecture defied human concepts of order. There weren’t any straight lines. The other part had to do with the magic that infused everything.
So, it took me more than an hour to find the area where Lizzy and her parents lived, and another half hour to correctly identify her house. I had knocked on the door of three other houses that looked similar to hers, but no one answered. I was about to turn away from the fourth house, when the door opened and Bob peered out.
“Erin! How are you? Come in, come in.” He beamed at me, and I realized how lonely he must have felt.
“Hi,” I said as I stood in the foyer. “It’s Oriel. He’s been in a fight, and one of his wounds is rather nasty. I found some potions and a salve and bandaged him up, but I don’t have any medical training. I just know some first aid.”
“Ah. Well, I’m not the healer in the family, but I do know a couple of witches who I can call.”
I waited while he made a phone call. When he finished, I asked, “How can you call out? My phone never works in the Village.”
He chuckled. “Before mobile phones, all telephones were hardwired. I had the phone put in here forty years ago. It doesn’t seem to be affected by magic. Now, I need to go get my friend and bring her back. Do you want to go with me, or go back to Oriel’s and wait with him?”
I thought about it, then said, “I’ll go with you. Can you drop me by Rosie’s? I mean, I’ve done as much as I can for him.”
Even though all my clothes were at Oriel’s, I would need my car to haul them away, and I didn’t trust him to keep his hands and his magic to himself. Just because the fool got himself into trouble didn’t mean I was going to forget about his kidnapping me and locking me up for a week.
Bob dropped me off at Rosie’s and waited at the end of the alley until I went inside. As soon as I entered the place, I heard someone scream, and I braced for combat even as I frantically looked around.
The people rushing toward me were Jenny and Emily, my coworkers. Before I could open my mouth, both were on me, hugging me, and babbling about how glad they were to see me, and asking me if I was okay.
Then Sam charged out of his office and practically ran over a couple of people makin
g his way across the room. He pulled me out of the grasp of the waitresses and drew me into a hug that almost crushed me.
“Lassie, where have you been? Are you all right?”
“I can’t breathe,” I managed to say. He let off a little, and I took a deep breath. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”
That proved easier to say than do. I ended up sitting at the bar with Sam pouring me a beer and a double shot of expensive Irish whiskey while a couple of dozen people stopped by and wished me well. After a while, Steve Dworkin brought me a large bowl of my favorite seafood chowder.
As I was eating, Sam leaned across the bar and said in a low voice, “When you disappeared, I feared the worst. The last anyone remembers seeing you was when you and that Fae boyfriend of yours got ambushed at your flat.”
“That’s the last I saw of me, too,” I answered. “Oriel got protective and kidnapped me. He’s been holding me prisoner at his place in Killarney Village.”
Sam’s eyebrows rose. “From your tone of voice, you didn’t consider his action as very reasonable.”
“Not hardly. He did something that knocked me out, and when I woke up, I was at his house, alone, locked in with a ward. He didn’t show up for five days.”
“Did he survive your reunion?”
I snorted. “I went easy on him. Someone stuck something very sharp in him, and I patched him up as best I could. Bob Erikson dropped me off here on his way to pick up a witch he knows who has some healing knowledge.”
I was enjoying an Irish coffee and trying to figure out how to retrieve my clothes when Jolene showed up. “Thank all the gods,” she said as she hugged me.
I told her what happened. “I don’t know what kind of magic he used to knock me out, but I didn’t appreciate it.”
“Probably some variation of a glamour,” Jolene said. “I can give you a charm that might prevent that.”
“That would be nice.”
“He probably thought he was doing the right thing to protect you,” she said.
“Probably. Lizzy warned me that he might have some different attitudes toward women than I was used to.” I could sort of understand Oriel’s urge to protect me, but he needed to understand some boundaries before I let him touch me again.
“Human women,” Jolene said. “He wouldn’t have dared to do that to a Fae woman. But he’s Unseelie. Be careful, Erin. He might view you as more of a pet than a lover.”
“You think? If he wants a pet, he needs to get a cat or something. I’m not putting up with that crap. That reminds me, what’s the deal with you two? He said you used to date?”
She snorted, “Is that what he called it? A one-night stand that lasted a week, then he ghosted on me. Just disappeared without a word, and I didn’t see him again for almost a year. Then the bastard had the balls to put the make on me when I did run into him again.”
Well, that was enlightening. I wasn’t sure if I was glad I asked the question, though.
Jolene took me to her house, where she created a charm that I put on the chain with the star ruby. Then we drove out to Killarney Village to retrieve my clothes and found Bob’s car parked in front of Oriel’s house.
I knocked on the door, and Bob opened it. He smiled when he saw us and stood aside so we could enter.
“Marli is tending to him,” Bob said. “She says that wound in his side looks like he was stabbed with a sword. What he really needs is a real healer. I was just getting ready to drive over to Rosie’s and see if Sam knew anyone who could come out here.”
“Agatha Cromwell,” Jolene said. “We could fetch her for you. She’s expensive, though.”
“I don’t think Oriel is hurting for money,” I said, “or for something to barter.”
Bob nodded. “He usually pays with jewelry or other metal workings. The Fae don’t deal with money very often. They prefer gold, silver, and precious stones.”
We loaded my clothes into Jolene’s car and drove to my place, where she helped me haul everything up to my apartment. She called Agatha Cromwell, who agreed to go out to Killarney Village that evening.
“I was hoping to go to work tonight,” I told Jolene. “Missing all that work has put a serious dent in my finances.”
“Don’t worry about Agatha,” she said. “I’ll pick her up and take her out there.”
“Thanks.” It was nice to have friends, but I knew I needed to think up something to thank Jolene for all of her help.
Chapter 17
Two days after I escaped Oriel’s protection, the ley lines went wild again. I was working behind the bar, and although I felt the disruption, it was severely muted.
The good news was that Sam’s spells kept the chaos out of Rosie’s. The mages in the bar all felt the event, but no one got sick, and we didn’t have any spontaneous magic erupt. The bad news was that the Knights were ready for the event and barged into the bar, obviously intent on taking over.
Since the entrance was large enough for only one person at a time to come through, we had ample warning. A Knight with drawn sword rushed into the bar, followed by his buddies. One at a time.
“Hey!” I shouted. “No weapons allowed!”
The guy in the front didn’t pay any attention to me. I shielded and picked up the spelled baseball bat from under the bar, then hurried to meet him. On my way past the coat rack, I pulled my dagger out from its sheath inside my coat.
The first Knight stopped with his sword held out in front of him as his friends fanned out in a semicircle just inside the door.
“This establishment is closed, by order of the Archbishop!” the guy yelled. “Everyone will line up and leave in an orderly fashion. Please have your identification ready to check.”
Pulling power from the ley line into my hands, I swung the bat and knocked him down. His shield protected him from injury but didn’t deflect the power I wielded. The Knight next to him slashed at me with his sword, which bounced off my shield. My backhand swing with the bat caught him and sent him stumbling back into another Knight, and they crashed to the floor.
“No fire!” Sam roared as he came out of his office and took in the scene. A blast of wind hit me and the Knights, knocking all of us off-balance. I fell to the floor and rolled to the right, giving anyone behind me a free line of fire at the Knights. A bolt of lightning flashed through the space where I had been standing.
One of the Knights staggered within reach, and I stabbed him in the thigh with my dagger. He cried out and swung his sword at me, but my shield held. I ripped the dagger free, opening a large gash in his leg. He dropped his sword and clutched at the wound. Rising to my knees, I hit him with the bat, and he toppled over.
Liam, my partner behind the bar and a ley line mage like me, let loose with a blast of ley line energy that blew three of the Knights back into the wall behind them. That was followed by another bolt of lightning and another powerful gust of wind.
“Give me the bat,” a voice said. I looked up to see Steve, the cook, standing over me. I handed it to him, and he stepped over me and started clubbing one of the Knights.
Crawling back behind the bar, I pulled my sword from where it hung on the coat rack. One of the Knights circled around Steve and tried to stab him, but Steve’s shield held. The Knight’s shield didn’t as I thrust with my spelled sword. It entered his back, and the point came out under his breast bone.
Faced with resistance they hadn’t expected, the Knights tried to retreat through the front door but ran into more of their fellows trying to come in from outside. I cut down three more of them before the rest managed to push their way outside.
Steve and I wore captured star rubies, so we followed them. As soon as we were outside, he cut loose with a jet of flame and I started firing off ley missiles. The Knights turned and ran, but I vaporized two of them when their shields failed, and one of Steve’s fireballs immolated another.
We followed them out of the alley to the street, and I heard sirens in the distance. Several of the Knights scram
bled into one of their SUVs parked across the street, and Steve hit it with a fireball. The vehicle went up in a roar of flame, and as the occupants jumped out, the gas tank exploded.
That’s when I noticed the TV van and the camera crew set up down the street. I tugged on Steve’s arm and pointed. To my horror, he didn’t hesitate. Another fireball engulfed the reporters and their van, followed by its gas tank exploding.
“No!” I shouted.
Steve shook his head. “Better than having this on the evening news,” he said, his face a grim mask.
“But, they’re innocents. Humans.”
“Witnesses. Witnesses and enablers. You think they were here by accident?”
Sam came out and surveyed the carnage, then put out his hands to Steve and me.
“I don’t think you want to be holding those when the cops show up.”
I handed him my sword, and Steve gave him my knife and the bouncer bat. Sam took them inside and came back out a few minutes later.
The cops and a fire engine showed up about fifteen minutes after the fight ended. Captain Blair strolled up, looked around, and sighed. Sergeant Mackle wandered over to the burned-out SUV and peeked inside, then walked all the way around it and headed toward the smoking remains of the TV van. Josh Carpenter, who had one of the rubies, and Shawna started cordoning the area off with that yellow ribbon the police used.
“Quite a mess,” Blair said.
“You haven’t seen the inside of my pub,” Sam shot back. “Hooligans and thieves, come busting in and trying to rough up my customers. Got what they deserved.”
Blair’s head jerked around, and he stared at Sam. “They came into your bar?”
“Come and see. Busted the place up, assaulted my bartender and my chef, roughed up my customers. Just come and see. And then when we threw them out, they started throwing fireballs in all directions. Tried to burn the place down, and you see what they did to those poor people over there.” I had never seen Sam so angry, and Blair took a step back.
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