I leaned against the wall next to Ken, crossed my arms in the same stance as his, and gave Rand a long, slow look, beginning at his feet. When I reached his face, his smile almost drew me to make eye contact with him myself.
Instead, I looked at the faery, who wore black boxer-briefs and a sour expression. “Keep your own; it doesn’t matter. He can either wear those or go commando. It’s no concern of mine.”
Once the clothing situation had been settled, with Rando-Commando in the faery’s ill-fitting clothes and shoes, Methier took a seat and slipped his wrists into the cuffs for Ken to click shut. “Let him sit across from me so I can study his features,” the faery said.
Methier stared at Rand, the soul of insolence as he sat there and stared back. In a few seconds, bit by bit, Methier changed. His light-blond hair grew honey-colored, wavy, and down to his shoulders. His body slimmed. His shoulders widened. His straight, masculine mouth grew a bit more curved and tilted up at the edges, and his brown eyes turned a brilliant shade of deep blue-green.
“Holy shit,” Ken muttered.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Knowing what faeries could do with their glamour and watching them do it were two different things.
Even Rand looked freaked out when he turned around. “Let’s get out of here, Dru.”
I nodded. “Release the guard from whatever you’ve done to him.”
Rand nodded, touched the guard’s arm gently, and said a few words before he slipped past us into the hallway. It wouldn’t do to have the guard see two Quince Randolphs.
The guard blinked a few times, and Ken said, “We’re done. Thanks, sergeant.”
“No problem, detective.” He unlocked Methier-Rand from the table, secured the handcuffs behind him, and pushed him toward the door in the back of the room.
“Thank you,” I told Methier. He gave me a solemn nod and led the guard out into the hallway. I hoped we were doing the right thing.
Ken accompanied us past the outside guard, who needed a little elven mind-magic to agree that, yes, the man leaving with us looked the same as the man coming in.
We said our good-byes and walked to the van. “Thank God you didn’t bring the Rolls,” Rand said. “It’s already been shot to hell and back.”
I side-eyed him. “Thank you for thanking me, and you’re welcome.”
I pulled out into the parking lot while Rand took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment.
Without warning, he turned around and jerked my arm so violently I almost drove into a police squad car before I could stop the van.
“What the hell has happened to my son?”
Chapter 21
“If you touch this steering wheel again, I’ll get out of this van and walk…walk…somewhere. I’ll probably get run down by a car or shot by a werewolf who doesn’t know the bounty on my head’s been lifted, and then you’ll never know the answers to your questions.” Elven ingrate.
His sunburned look returned. “I can get my own answers. I am Elf.”
“No, you are asshole,” I said. “I should have left you in prison like a trophy waiting for Florian to collect your head and hang it on his hunting lodge wall because, by now, he knows you’re not in Elfheim. He already knows I was there earlier and you weren’t with me.”
That shut His Elfness up for a few seconds. When he spoke again, he’d lost the imperious undertones, or at least most of them.
“I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to accept not being in charge. It’s hard being locked up and held prisoner.”
Poor, pitiful Little Lord Elferoy. “Yes, you and Princess Kirian have a lot in common. I don’t think she much liked being locked in your basement, either.”
He turned slowly in the passenger seat and stared at me. “Pull over.”
“What?” We were in the middle lane of Claiborne Avenue in afternoon rush-hour. What had he been smoking in prison?
“Pull over and tell me what is going on, Dru. Now.”
“I’ll tell you when we get home. You need to check on Pentewyn; he ate too many frozen rats.”
We spent the next twenty minutes in silent stop-and-go traffic, plus ten minutes in the Popeye’s fried chicken drive-through. I needed to eat something that didn’t involve smoked meat.
The dragon’s rat farts met us at the back door, killing any notion of pigging out on onion rings and spicy chicken legs.
“Good God,” Rand said, pulling up the bottom of Methier’s t-shirt to cover his nose. “How many did you give him? He normally eats three rats in the morning and three at night.”
“How would I know that? When I got back, he was the size of a car, he was so mad. I gave him the whole box.” There had to be at least forty rats in that box. Poor dragon.
Rand left the back door open and shooed the bloated lizard out to fly off his excess gas. A large bird of prey was as small as he could make himself in his condition, and steam drifted from his butt as he took off. Poor guy; I felt guilty.
“I’ll create an air-freshening charm when we get upstairs.” I grabbed the food, led Rand out of the greenhouse, and stopped to get the charm ingredients out of my bedroom closet. Gruff greeted The Rand with his happy dance and probably an earful of woes. Sebastian wound around Rand’s legs. No one was happy to see me.
I set off one cleansing charm in the hallway and tossed the other down the stairs. Within seconds, the air was as fresh as a sunny day in Elfheim, not that I’d ever seen one. Afterward, I went into Rand’s office to wait. The shower came on, ran for a while, then turned off.
He came into the office a few minutes later in bare feet, wearing jeans and a white sweater, looking more like his normal elf lord self.
“Start at the beginning.” He sat at the other end of the love seat.
I curled my legs underneath me, wondering where to start. “First of all, your son is fine.”
“No, he’s lonely,” Rand said. “He wants his mother, and the image he keeps projecting of his mother is not Eugenie. It’s you. How has he seen you?”
Holy crap. Maybe baby elves imprinted on their first mother figure the same as a baby duck. The thought of that innocent little boy feeling lonely for me, and the mother he should have been pining for, brought me to the edge of tears again, but I stuffed them down deep.
“I finally woke up in Elfheim six days after the incident in Vampyre, where I accidentally channeled your power,” I said. “What was the backlash from me accidentally incinerating Garrett Melnick?”
Rand waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Nobody knows you did it. They just found a pile of burned rags and Adrian Hoffman missing, so they’re blaming him. Etienne Boulard was quick to lay claim to the regent’s position.”
I bet he was. Jean would be more incensed than ever.
“I found Kirian by accident, wandering around and trying to get my strength back,” I continued. There was no point in bringing Rene into this. “By then, it was clear Elfheim was under attack from Florian. The storm was violent, and everything had flooded. The manor house staff had disappeared, going up into the hills. The midwife had left Eugenie alone.”
“I’ll have that midwife horse-whipped,” Rand said in a matter-of-fact way. “Where is Kirian?”
I ignored him. “We all decided to transport out of the manor house and perhaps come here.”
“Who was transporting?”
I’d answer his questions if he’d just let me complete a few consecutive sentences without interrupting.
“Me, Eugenie, Rene, Jean, and Kirian,” I said. “Everyone else was gone. We got into the transport on the landing between the first and second floors, and Florian showed up before we could leave. He threw one of his fireballs at us, but hit the stair railing instead. Eugenie was injured, so we went….somewhere else. I didn’t know what to expect here since you had stopped communicating, and I didn’t want Kirian in danger of being caught by her brother.”
“Where did you go?” Rand narrowed his eyes. “Did you take her back to Lafi
tte’s place in the Beyond?”
“Rand, I am not going to tell you where I took them. The fewer people who know where Kirian is, the better, and that includes you.”
“My son—”
“Is fine.” I looked down at my hands, which I’d unconsciously clenched so hard my knuckles had turned white. “The pregnancy had advanced faster than any of us expected, even the midwife. After Eugenie was injured in Florian’s attack, she went into labor.”
Rand scooted closer to me and took my hands. “What happened, Dru?”
I swallowed hard. “Eugenie died giving birth to your son; she wanted us to save him instead of her.” I stared at him until he nodded. I wanted to make sure he understood that Eugenie had put the baby above everything else.
I took a moment to center myself. “She wanted to name him Michael, so that’s what I called him. If you want to give him another name, a family name, that’s okay, of course. I know it’s your decision, but please let Michael be a part of his name.”
“Michael will be his name then.” Rand’s voice was soft. “I know you won’t believe me, but I am sorry about Eugenie. I didn’t treat her well.”
“No, you didn’t.” I pulled my hands away from him. “But Michael is beautiful. He’s tiny, but he’s perfect.” What a sap.
“Where is he?”
“He’s safe, and that’s all I am going to tell you right now….Don’t you start doing your ripe tomato impression on me.”
I reached out and grabbed one of his hands again. “Look, Florian knows I was in Elfheim. After we transported out, he had complete run of your empty house, so he knows by now you aren’t there. He also saw Kirian.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but something in my face shut him up.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Your picture’s been all over the newspapers for being arrested as a suspect in those fireworks shows. Florian will come after you, looking for his sister. Michael can’t be anywhere near that madman. His safety has to come first.”
For once in his overprivileged life, Rand listened. His complexion faded back to normal and, by the time I finished my spiel, he was nodding.
“You’re right. I just want to see him. To hold him.”
I breathed an inward sigh of relief. “And I can arrange that. I need your help with something first, though.”
Tomato Face threatened to return. “How dare you use my son as leverage to force me into helping you.”
“Yep. Sounds like something you would do, doesn’t it?”
“Hmph.” He let out a melodramatic sigh. “What do you want?”
“I want you to go with me to visit the mayor of New Orleans and tell him there’s about to be a preternatural showdown on the St. Charles Avenue parade route. And then I want you to help me convince him to give Jean Lafitte a job on his staff.”
Crickets.
I’d finally gotten Quince Randolph to shut up.
Chapter 22
Antoine DeFazo had been elected mayor on the usual promises. He was going to get a handle on crime. He was going to improve the city’s crumbling infrastructure. He was going to lower the judicial hammer on the owners of blighted properties. He was a native son whose family had owned a grocery store in the Italian section of the lower French Quarter that in the old days was called “Little Sicily.”
His great-grandfather, it was said, sent a few enemies to the bottom of the Mississippi in cement shrimp boots, but who’s to say?
I had to pull the major political coup card in order to get on his calendar on short notice—DeFazo was up for reelection next year. Rand and I were posing as the owners of a major European tour operator interested in opening its U.S. headquarters in New Orleans. I might have used the word “billions” in my inflated description to the mayor’s handler.
After an evening of contentious planning with my grumbling elf, who finally admitted it was a good idea to bring DeFazo up to speed on the world he really lived in, we’d gotten up on Thursday morning, dressed in business attire, and made our way to DeFazo’s office on Perdido Street.
Men and women dressed a lot like us scurried around the marbled halls and carpeted offices. We were finally ushered to chairs to wait for our appointment. An office assistant offered us coffee.
“Mae arnaf angen diod o wisgi,” Rand said. He had elfishly decided that until the mayor himself spoke to us, he’d pretend to speak no English. That last word had sounded a lot like the Welsh word for whiskey, so I declined for both of us. After the meeting, we both might need the hard stuff.
Finally, we were escorted into Mayor DeFazo’s plush office. He had a large window overlooking downtown, a large glass table that served as his desk, and a large head of white hair that looked sprayed to withstand a category five hurricane without losing its swoops and swirls.
Rand and I took seats at a round table near the window, and after his effusive greeting, DeFazo joined us. So did a woman he introduced as his director of tourism.
“I’m sorry, but we must meet with you alone,” I said. “We do not do business with intermediaries.”
“Dywedwch wrthi y byddaf yn chwipio hi ar strydoedd Elfheim os na fydd hi'n gadael,” Rand said.
I stared at him. What?
I said to tell her I’d have her whipped in the streets of Elfheim if she didn’t leave.
“He says perhaps we can meet with you afterward,” I told her with a smile. Rand, I kicked under the table.
“It’s fine, Linda,” the mayor said. “We’re just talking generalities today anyway.”
The poor man had no idea.
As soon as Linda left, I walked to the mayor’s door, closed it, and shot enough of my native magic into it to lock it. Then I walked behind his desk and disabled his phone.
The mayor was frowning when I returned to the table. “This is not our normal way of doing business,” he said.
“Mayor, the things we’re about to tell you have nothing to do with normal,” I said. “Are you a drinking man? Because if you have any alcohol hidden in this office, you might want to pour yourself a drink. And hand me your cell phone, please. I’ll return it when we’re done.”
His left eye developed a tic, but he was otherwise calm as he took the phone out of his shirt pocket and looked at it. I plucked it from his hand before he could place a call.
“Did your parents read you fairy tales as a child, Mr. DeFazo?” I asked. “Or did you read them to your own children when they were young?” I recalled reading the divorced mayor, now quite the playboy about town, had two kids in college.
“Of course.”
“Imagine if those things were true. Elves. Fairies. Wizards. Vampires. Big bad wolves.”
“Look.” He shook his head; his hair didn’t move. “We have plenty of those haunted tour operators, so if that’s what you’re looking for—”
“We aren’t selling tours,” I said. “I’m a wizard, and Mr. Randolph here is an elf. There’s about to be a war on the streets of this city—a deadly war among creatures like us—and I want you to be informed so that we can stop it.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. You’re lunatics.” He stood up and stalked toward the door, his red power tie flapping. I pulled Charlie out from beneath the jacket of my navy business suit, aimed at a glass vase of flowers sitting on a nearby table, and set the lilies on fire. The flames grew, but the flowers didn’t burn.
Ah. Charlie could make cold fire, which was a useful thing to know.
DeFazo turned, his mouth stretched into a sneer. “So you know some magic tricks.”
“Stop thinking about yelling,” Rand said. “The wizard here put a soundproof charm on your office as soon as we walked in. No one can hear you.”
“Elaine!” he shouted, banging on the door. “I’m locked in here with madmen. Help!”
Rand and I sat at the table and watched him throw a full-on adult temper tantrum. He banged and yelled and threw things. He threw a paperweight at the window, sending crackles through the safety glass. I looked in
my messenger bag, pulled out a healing charm and spread it on the window, which within seconds knit itself back into unmarked, sparkling glass.
That seemed to have taken most of the fight out of him, but I didn’t want him beaten. I wanted him convinced. I wanted him frightened enough to cooperate.
“What will it take to convince you?” Rand asked, sounding his most reasonable. “I am the leader of the elves, and my people have skills you might find interesting. We have great powers of mental persuasion, so I might be able to promise you a re-election, for example.”
That got DeFazo’s attention. “How?”
Rand shrugged. “I would simply have someone outside each polling place, shaking hands. Whoever was touched by an elf, or who took a flyer we handed them, would vote for you. You wouldn’t have to waste a fortune in advertising or holding expensive fundraising events.
My mouth was as agape as that of the mayor. Rand had given thought to how elves could influence the human world, and the prospect was frightening. He could get some narcissistic lunatic elected president if he wanted.
I don’t know if DeFazo was frightened at that thought, but I was.
“Or I could do the same for your opposition.” Rand gave the mayor a friendly smile that sent an uncomfortable chill down my spine.
DeFazo made a rude noise. “As interesting as that might be, it’s utter rubbish.”
“Well, how about this? I could make you stand on your head naked, right now, on top of this table.”
DeFazo laughed; I clapped my hands over my eyes. I so did not want to see this. “Make him keep his underwear on at least, please.”
“Oh Dru, where’s your sense of fun?” Quick as a striking cobra, Rand reached out and grabbed the mayor’s wrist. Poor DeFazo made the mistake of eye contact, which simply gave Rand more power. The guy didn’t have a chance.
He stripped down to a pair of black boxers with bright red lips all over them, climbed on his round conference table, and, to my surprise, made a fair effort to stand on his head. Mostly he stood on his hands and knees and tucked his head toward his groin, but it was a good try. I shifted my chair so I wouldn’t have such a broad view of those boxers.
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