by Sam Cheever
“Stay there. We’ll be right over.”
23
They Look Like Aliens
The pages flicked past, quick and jerky, hesitating occasionally and then starting up again as the book waited for me to give it direction. I called up a vision of Enchanted General Hospital. I had no idea what the maternity ward looked like, but I just pictured babies swathed in blue and pink blankets.
The magic swirled out of the book, a clear wash of energy dappled with multi-hued sparkles that swirled overhead and then slid down our bodies to the floor. Without warning, the energy tightened, squeezing us in a relentless grip, and began to twist. The world whipped past in a dizzying rush. My vision turned wonky. My stomach roiled until I closed my eyes against the resulting vertigo. Though I was expecting it, I sucked in a startled gasp when I was yanked off my feet and dragged inside the book.
Moments later, the magic dropped us in a corridor that smelled like baby powder and disinfectant and then sifted away. The book popped into its travel size, and I shoved it into my pocket, patting it for good measure.
I glanced at Sebille, who was shoving her long, red braid over one shoulder. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that,” she complained, her eyes looking slightly crossed.
Glancing around, I noticed that we were standing in front of the window overlooking the nursery. Beyond the glass were row upon row of clear bassinets, many of them occupied with tiny figures wrapped tightly in pastel-hued blankets with matching caps on their heads.
Tiny puckered faces showed in the midst of the cloth wrappings, most of them asleep.
“Aw,” I said, moving closer to the glass.
“They look like aliens,” Sebille groused.
But I saw the wistful expression softening her face before she ruthlessly squelched it.
“Hey,” said a familiar deep voice.
I turned to find Grym striding my way.
“You got here fast,” he said, offering me a smile.
“We used the book,” I said, looking around. The area looked clean and calm, though I noticed the lack of medical personnel. “Is everybody okay?”
Grym sighed. “Yeah. We took the non-magics into a private room for deprogramming.” He grimaced as he said it. Like me, Grym apparently didn’t enjoy the idea of messing with other people’s memories. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I told him. He listened intently as Sebille stared through the large viewing window at the little sleepers behind it.
“So this brownie, you think she’s the creature who captured Hobs’ heart?”
“Yes. But it’s much worse than missing love serum. He’s been poisoned with Obsession.”
Grym whistled. “That’s bad, Naida.”
My stomach twisted with pain, but I nodded. “I know. The sooner we do what Desiree is asking, the sooner we can get Whom the poison so he can make an antidote.”
Grym paled. “Hold on. You’re not seriously considering taking her a baby.”
Of course I wasn’t. “She wants Devin’s pregnant wife.”
Something that looked like guilt slid over Grym’s handsome face. I narrowed my gaze on him. “What?”
Grym continued to avoid my gaze for another minute. Finally, I grabbed his hand. “Tell me.”
He sighed. “I just found out something important. I wanted to tell you but…” He sighed. “It’s not my story to tell.” When I braced to argue, he held up a finger. “Hold on.” Grym dialed a number and spoke into the phone. “I need you for a minute,” he told the person on the phone. “I’m at the viewing window.” He hesitated a beat and then nodded. “Good. I’ll wait.”
Grym disconnected and looked at us. “He’s on his way.”
“Who?” I asked, losing patience with the delay.
“Me,” said a husky voice I remembered from the mall.
I turned to see Devin Sampson striding toward us. Something was different about him. Something I couldn’t identify, except that he seemed taller, with an aura of power I hadn’t noticed before.
He nodded at me and then at Sebille. “Ladies. What can I help you with?”
“You tell me,” I said. “Grym thought you needed to be here.”
The gargoyle sighed. “They got a visit from Desiree.”
Sampson’s face tightened. An angry light filled his gaze. “I’m sure that was pleasant.”
In the interests of time, I decided not to dance around the issue. “She’s demanding that we bring your wife to her, or my friend Hobs is going to die.” I decided not to mention the brownie, who I assumed was in as much trouble as Hobs, because I didn’t want to spend time trying to explain her involvement.
The shifter didn’t look surprised. Scrubbing a big hand over his mouth, he asked, “What poison did she give him?”
“Obsession,” Sebille said. “Why am I getting the feeling you know Desiree personally?”
Sampson looked surprised by Sebille’s directness. He turned toward the viewing window. Something soft came into his eyes when he looked at the babies. It didn’t last long. His jaw tensed a beat later. “She’s my sister.”
Dimpled cherub cheeks! I hadn’t seen that coming. “Your…sister?” I narrowed my gaze. “You’re Denzel? Brother of Desiree and Lovelace?”
Devin…or Denzel…sighed. “Unfortunately.” When he saw how we were looking at him, Sampson shook his head. “Look, it’s not what you think. I had nothing to do with those nasty cherubs. They did belong to me once…”
I bristled and he hurried on.
“But I left all that behind.” He frowned. “I’m done with that life. I’m done with the cancer that infects the place.”
I threw Grym a glower. He’d known about Sampson and he hadn’t told me.
His handsome face creased in a frown.
“What cancer?” I asked, my voice too soft. My throat was tight as the pieces started to come together in my mind.
“Power, control, greed.” Samson’s look was pleading. He really seemed to want us to understand. “Love isn’t supposed to be controlling. It isn’t supposed to be domineering. But after millennia of learning how effectively love works to control and subjugate, my people have gone bad. Lovelace isn’t completely gone yet. He still tries to maintain a level of care for his subjects.” He said the word as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. “But Desiree…” Sampson scraped a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up in tufts all over his head. “She was always a handful. As a little girl, she was very demanding and needed everyone to love her. That’s only gotten worse over the centuries.”
“Why does Desiree want your wife?” Grym asked.
Sampson looked at the cop as if he’d forgotten Grym was there. He frowned. “Desiree wants a child so badly. But she can’t have one of her own. I think it’s because her nature is too poisonous. A child couldn’t survive in that environment. So she wants the next best thing.”
“Your baby,” I said, nodding. “Couldn’t she pay someone to be a surrogate mother?” I asked, curious.
His smile was angry. “That’s what she’s trying to do with my wife. Though, in her usual fashion, she cares little if the surrogate or the father agree to the bargain.”
“Why your baby, though,” Grym said. “Not that I’d wish that on any child, but why not steal someone else’s baby? She has to know you’ll fight her.”
“Actually, until she sent her cherubs down to look for me, she had no idea where I’d gone. I’d recreated myself as a shifter. Shifter magic is a perfect cloaking device against cupid magics. But her spies found Nina, and they recognized the magic signature of our child. She won’t stop until she takes our baby. And Nina won’t survive the process.”
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “So that’s why they’ve been attacking? They were trying to draw you out?”
Sampson nodded.
“We need to get to Loveland,” I told him. “We need to save Hobs, and it sounds like you need to confront your sister.”
“You’
re not sacrificing my wife and child,” Sampson said, his face dark with anger and his hands fisted. “I’ll kill you if you try.”
I held up a hand. “I have no desire to hurt your wife. I have another idea. But we will need your help. Can we count on you?”
“Of course,” Sampson said. “I’m going to have to fight this battle anyway. I’ll take all the help I can get.” He frowned. “But we’re not taking my wife to Loveland. There has to be another way.”
“There is, I think. I just need to go see someone to make sure. And…” I grimaced. “I might need some of your wife’s hair.”
Proving how bombproof my bestie had become from hanging around with my crew and me, Lea barely twitched when Sebille and I popped out of thin air inside her closed shop, Herbal Remedies with Mystical Properties.
She arched a single light brown brow at me and closed the book she’d been reading. Coming out from behind the long, glass counter, Lea crossed her arms over her chest and looked a question at me. I closed the Book of Pages and tried a guilty smile. “Sorry for barging in.”
“The door works,” she told us. “And there’s this little thing called knocking.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But Hobs is dying and we really need your help.”
Her pretty face paled with alarm. “What happened?” Moving behind the counter again, she started pulling down jars of herbs. “What’s wrong with him? I have some fenugreek for toxins. Clove is an anti-microbial,” She stretched toward the highest shelf, wiggling her fingers so a jar filled with pale green leaves floated down to her. “Sage is a good antibiotic…”
I shook my head. “None of those will help, Lea. He’s been poisoned with Obsession.”
She stopped and turned. “What? How is that possible?”
“It’s a long story. But he’s in really bad shape.”
“Doctor Whom…”
“He’s with him now. But he needs us to bring a sample of the poison to him so he can create the antidote.”
Lea wrapped her arms around the big jar of sage and nodded. “Okay. I’m with you so far.”
“We need to go to Loveland in the demon realm,” Sebille said.
Lea blinked. Then she laughed. “That’s funny. I thought I heard you say you were going into the demon realm.”
Sebille and I stared back at her. She paled. “Festering Frog flatulence! Seriously? That’s like a death sentence.”
“We’ll have someone to help us,” I said. “Someone who knows his way around the place. Someone who’s from there.”
“Brock?”
Brock was a friend of ours from nearby Illusion City. He was a demon, but he was a good one. Though, in his ten-foot-tall demon form with enormous bat-like wings, he was a little scary. I shook my head. Getting Brock’s help wasn’t a bad idea. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to hunt him down and pitch it to him. “No. One of the cupid princes is coming. His sister, Princess Desiree, is behind all these cherub attacks. And it turns out she’s been hunting for him. Or, actually, his pregnant wife.”
Lea’s brows lowered as she tried to decipher my poorly-told story. “Long story short,” I said impatiently. “She wants the baby. Denzel knows he needs to confront her about it. But I’m afraid Desiree will just blow the place up if we don’t show up with the pregnant wife.”
Lea’s mouth fell open. “Oh no. We’re not giving an innocent baby to this monster.”
“No, we’re not. But I was hoping Nina Sampson could make an appearance. Or, maybe somebody who looks just like her?”
Lea blinked. Then blinked again. Finally, she said, “You’re thinking four-dimensional glamour?”
“Yes.”
She turned around and started putting jars back into their spots on the shelves. As she wiggled her fingers again to send the sage skyward, Sebille and I shared a look.
Sebille, whose patience had never been a snake with a long tail, said. “Lea, we need to hurry. Hobs might not have much longer.”
My bestie made an impatient sound. “I’m working as fast as I can,” she said, pulling another jar from the shelves and opening it to scoop lacy green leaves into a bowl. “You have hair?”
I found myself grinning in relief. “I do.” I handed her the hair. “Can we help?”
Lea nodded. “Sebille, get the Bilberry extract out of the fridge and make me a tea with it. Use lavender and basil for the base. Naida, go to my closet and find something that looks like the type of clothes this woman would wear.”
My steps lighter than they’d felt in hours, I hurried up the stairs at the back of Lea’s shop to do as she’d asked.
24
Not Happening, Gargoyle
An hour later, we exited Lea’s place to find Grym and Sampson waiting for us on the sidewalk. Lea locked up and turned to a flummoxed Sampson. He stared at Lea, his expression filled with wonder. “That’s amazing.” He eyed the rounded belly. “You look just like my wife. Is there a baby in there?”
Lea flinched. “No. Just a pillow.” But she kept rubbing the bump as if she did have a little bundle of joy in there.
“You even sound like her,” Sampson said, poking a finger at the pillow “baby”.
“It’s a four-dimensional glamour,” I told the shifter as Lea smacked his finger away.
“This is why you wanted Nina’s hair?” He asked.
“Yes.” I frowned. “Can we get moving please?” I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were frittering Hobs’ and the little brownie’s lives away standing there.
“Yeah, sorry,” Sampson said, giving me a tight smile. “We can go.”
“Where?” Grym asked. “How do we get to Loveland?”
“Lovelace just popped me over,” I said.
Sampson winced. “Yeah, I can’t do that. I’ve been away from there too long. I’ve lost my intrinsic connection to the place.”
“Then how?” Sebille asked.
“Through a portal,” he said. “The ogres have the closest one.”
Sebille and I shared a horrified look. “There has to be another way,” I said.
“Not if you want to do this in the minimum amount of time,” Sampson assured us.
Grym gave us a crooked grin. “Hey, while we’re there, you two could go see the naked ogre on the throne and ask to see the fine print in that contract you signed.”
“Not happening, gargoyle,” I said on a growl. I lifted my brows. “And you’re not my favorite person right now, so you might want to button it.”
Grym chuckled at the look on Sampson’s face. “Long story. I’ll tell you later.”
“You will not!” Sebille and I both said at once.
Fighting a grin, Sampson pointed toward an old-fashioned, panel-sided car that was parked in front of the herbal store. It looked a little like a hearse. I really hoped that wasn’t prescient. “We can drive to the boundary of King Rhorr’s land in my car. We’ll have to walk from there.”
We piled inside and Sampson drove out of the lot. “It’s a fifteen-minute drive to the border. Then it should take us another fifteen to the portal. Assuming we don’t get waylaid.”
My brows rose to my hairline. “Waylaid?”
Sampson made a dismissive sound. “You know ogres.”
Yeah, I did. Which was why my stomach was churning from his words.
We drove in silence through a lush, green landscape with gently rolling hills that got sharper and larger in the distance. The foothills rolled toward a range of perpetually snow-capped mountains that bordered and then eventually cut through The Enchanted Forest.
It was a beautiful drive. Until it wasn’t.
One minute the landscape was lush and green. The next it was brown and rocky. Sampson pulled off the road and drove across a dusty patch of ground bordered on three sides by smaller rocks built into a low wall. It was clearly a parking lot built by ogres. Sampson stopped the car in the middle of the space and killed the engine.
We all sat looking across the land in front of us, seeing the broken
towers and archways that I remembered from when Sebille and I had been there before.
Huge chunks of rock dotted the space, like squat, gray trees with no branches. Every gust of wind carried whirls of dust across the barren acreage.
We all filed out of the car.
Sampson pointed toward a tiny archway in the distance, next to a small pond with muddy looking water. “That’s the portal we need.”
“How can you tell?” Grym asked. “There are dozens of them.”
Sampson nodded. “I don’t have a strong connection to the place anymore. But I can still see its aura. There’s a glossy red aura over that portal. It will take us to Loveland.”
We started walking.
After a few steps, Sampson jerked to a stop and turned to Lea in her Nina glamour. He gave her an apologetic look. “I need to treat you like you’re Nina,” he said. “Desiree might have spies around the portal.”
Lea nodded and let him take her arm.
We managed to make it nearly to the portal before we saw the ogre. In fact, we got within fifteen feet of it.
So close.
A bald, purple mountain stepped out from behind a boulder, the ogre’s heavy features fixed in a murderous expression. He was holding a club that might have weighed as much as I did, and his thick, hairy arms were too muscular to fall straight at his sides. He had no hair on his head, but he had a coarse, rectangular patch of hair hanging from below his lips. The rough beard was cut straight across at the bottom and flexed as he snarled a warning to us. “Who goes there?”
“Who writes this guy’s dialogue?” I murmured to Sebille. She snorted in response.
Sampson lifted one fist in the air and then smacked it hard against his chest. He spoke a few words in a guttural language that I didn’t understand. But I recognized it as the language Rick and Maxine had spoken with the naked ogre.
The mountain with the club didn’t respond except to narrow his small blue eyes.
“This is Prince Denzel of Loveland,” Grym said. “I’m Detective Grym of the Enchanted Police Department.” He pointed to me. “That’s the Keeper of the Artifacts, Naida Griffith and that,” he jerked a thumb toward Sebille, “Is Princess Sebille of the fae.”
