by J. M. Frey
“I care not,” the Viceroy snarls.
“Your mother lives there still—”
“She died so that I may regain my magic! Do you know how I suffered? How it feels to be a magical being who is denied that magic? How it hurts? How it burns! Incessant! Never-ending!”
I realize that Elgar is not quite so oblivious as I thought. His eyes are open, wide and bulbous in his fear, and he is repeatedly jamming the emergency buzzer on the side of his bed.
“If you must take your vengeance on us for what we took from you, then do so. But leave him alone,” I command, sounding far more confident than I feel and cursing myself a fool for leaving Smoke in Victoria. For failing to obtain a gun of my own, as I suggested to Pip.
I have a vague thought of trying to snatch Riletti’s out of her holster, but I dare not turn my back on the Viceroy.
“Oh, I will have my revenge on you, and your whore,” the Viceroy sneers. “But first, I will have it on the man who is the Author of all my misfortunes and sorrows.”
Elgar makes a pained sound, and jerks his head around. “Forsyth!”
“Look at you. So small,” the Viceroy says to him, and it is nearly sorrowful, nearly gentle. Nearly. “You are human, after all. And I am more.”
His knife begins its downward swing, and I leap forward, grabbing the tray and sliding it over Elgar’s heart, hoping that it is thick enough to stop the blade. The scattered remains of Elgar’s meal—dirty dishes, old rice, cold tea—fly at the Viceroy’s face, and he rears back, indignant. His blade skids along the tray, no longer strongly wielded, and I am able to knock my hand hard enough against his wrist to send it flipping end over end into a shadow-laden corner.
Within seconds, the sound of feet running up the corridor and toward this room rings out in the hall.
“Riletti!” I hear Jackson shout. “What the hell is—why are you just standing there?”
The Viceroy turns on the balls of his feet, snarling as he comes back around toward me, and I shout a Word of Protection, just in case the room is saturated with enough magic for it to work.
It does.
The Viceroy rears back again, hands over his face as if the mere sound of the Word is dazzling to his eyes. He hisses again, wordless and infuriated. Then he seems to fold in on himself, shadow curling in upon shadow, and is gone.
Riletti, Jackson, and the two officers fall through the door like spilled water, whatever spell the Viceroy had placed on the entryway to keep them out suddenly vanished. The latter three shake their heads, pushing off the compulsion, while the nurse shoulders her way through them to check first on Juan, who is now bolt upright in his bed, eyes round with terror, and then to the obviously panicking Elgar.
“It’s him,” Elgar says over the din of doctors arriving and Juan loudly demanding an explanation, the officers speaking into their radios and shouting at one another. But Elgar’s words, his desperate, teary gaze, those are for me alone.
“Oh my god, Forsyth,” he says again, a tremulous whisper. “That was him. He’s here. He’s really here.”
CHAPTER 8
ELGAR
“We nearly had him,” Jackson says, standing at the foot of Elgar’s bed with notepad in hand. Elgar, still shaking, and having just witnessed how very much the police had not almost had him, stays quiet. He’s desperate for five minutes alone with Forsyth, but Forsyth’s stepped back out into the hall to call Pip, to make sure she is all right.
Forsyth’s explanation had been quick, and whispered hard into Elgar’s ear while the rest of the room around them was calming down, getting sorted, turning on lights and righting tables. Elgar isn’t entirely sure he understands what Forsyth meant about Pip being affected by the Viceroy’s magical blowback. He wants, needs, to understand. He wants Forsyth to be beside him, to be holding his hand to prove that they’re both still okay, dammit; to reassure him that the Viceroy is gone, that Elgar is safe, and that he isn’t going totally and completely bonkers.
Instead, he has to nod along with Jackson, and do whatever it is the nurse looking him over wants—look here, swallow this, drink that, lift your arm, make a fist, stare into this light—while Detective Khouri has a tête-à-tête with Juan. Who, by the way, looks like he’s about ready to crawl right out the window and run away screaming.
“How . . . where has he been?” Elgar manages to ask, just as Forsyth returns to the room. His posture is more relaxed now, the lines of worry on his face smoothed away. Pip must be fine.
“He was holed up with the waitress from that diner you frequent—Miss Madeline Garcia,” Forsyth says smoothly, stepping into the conversation with all the confidence of a man who knows he has every right to be a part of it.
What a character development, Elgar thinks dazedly. Forsyth would never have been comfortable doing that without the mask on before. And then his bruised brain catches up to what Forsyth actually said.
“He what?” Elgar splutters, stunned and horrified and suddenly feeling so very guilty. Here’s another person who has suffered simply because they’re part of the loose orbit of people Elgar has in his life.
A flash of green eyes over her shoulder, he remembers, as she went back into the kitchen. And the vague thought that her eyes were supposed to be blue. God, he really is an idiot. Ten thousand kinds of idiot. Moron. Imbecile. Witless.
“Yeah,” Riletti says. “There was a report from her father. He hadn’t heard from her in a few days, was concerned about her, about her new boyfriend. Says that he’d given her a black eye and maybe a burn, and when a duty cop went over check on her, the guy took off. Apparently, straight here. The CCTV cameras caught him out in the hall, and at one of the stop lights outside Miss Garcia’s house. It was a match. I’m sorry, Mr. Reed.”
“Was that yesterday night?” Elgar says, risking the pain of the stitches pulling on his right forearm to scrub his hands through his greasy hair, only to be met with another wad of bandage behind his right ear, and another patch of extreme tenderness. Dammit, he’d forgotten about that.
“Indeed. It was lucky that I booked so early a flight,” Forsyth says quietly.
“Yeah, it is,” Jackson says, equally soft, still looking sideways at Riletti, like he hasn’t quite figured out how to feel about her apparent nonaction just hours earlier. Elgar bets that she doesn’t even remember she’d just stood in the hall, doing nothing but trying to stop Forsyth when he entered the room. “The detective says that he doesn’t think this is the kind of stalker who kills his target—just everyone close to them, so they’re the only ones left, you know?”
On the bed beside Elgar, Juan whimpers, covers his face, and looks away.
“Sorry,” Jackson says softly as Khouri straightens and glares at the sergeant. “But we’ll keep you safe. We don’t know how he got in last night, but we’ve bumped up the security detail on you.”
It won’t matter, Elgar thinks, but doesn’t say. Put a hundred cops with a hundred guns in this hospital. Magic can get past them all.
A glance at Forsyth tells him that his creation is thinking the same thing. And, knowing Forsyth, he’s also starting to figure out how to stop even that. God, Elgar’s glad that Forsyth Turn is here. He wishes Lucy was here, too. Lucy Turn Piper understands his work, and his creations, better than even Elgar himself. She’d know what to do next, where to turn, what trope to use, or spell to invoke, or quest to undertake, or . . . or something. Not that Forsyth won’t figure it out, but if Lucy was here, it would just . . . make Elgar feel better. Okay, all right, he’ll admit it. He wants his whole family around him—Lucy, and Alis, as well as Forsyth and, yeah, Juan—because he’s scared. He wants their comfort, and to see with his own eyes that they’re safe.
Eventually, the nurse chivvies everyone out of the room so Juan and Elgar can rest. Forsyth, as Elgar knew he would, slips back in with three cups of coffee as soon as the nurse is gone long enough to let her guard down. She’s been fierce about protecting Elgar since the incident, and he thinks she’s probably feeling
guilty about letting the Viceroy slip by her. Elgar has a short, sharp moment of resenting her for it—Good! She should feel guilty!—before he beats it back. It’s not like she could have helped it.
Juan accepts his cup of black coffee from Forsyth, but says nothing else. Forsyth snags a chair with his foot and pulls it into the space between their beds so he can see, and presumably address, both of them at once. But Juan keeps his face turned away.
Elgar manages only a few sips of the wretched hospital coffee before the nausea robs it of its admittedly meager appeal. He shifts in the bed, waiting for Forsyth to say . . . something. Anything. But Forsyth seems just as lost in thought, going round and round things in his head, as Juan is.
Annoyed by everything that’s hanging in the air between them, Elgar finally sets his coffee aside and says, “You know, you’re allowed to be angry with me.”
Juan gasps, as if Elgar has slapped his face, and whips around to look at him, though he winces and has to shuffle to do so. “Angry with you?”
“It’s my fault,” Elgar says, remembering at the last second not to jerk his head at Juan’s arm; he gestures with a weak finger instead. Even that hurts. He lets his finger drop.
“Elgar, of course it’s not your fault—” Forsyth begins, even as Juan interrupts with:
“It’s not your fault! But I . . . god, I just . . .”
Both men trail off, staring at one another, tense and unsure of what should be said next. Or not.
Man up, Elgar chastises himself. Go on. Admit it. “I’m scared, too,” he eventually whispers.
“What that cop said!” Juan blurts. “About him going after the people close to you. I can’t. . . . Boss, I can’t. I . . . I mean, I don’t want to . . . to abandon you, but—I can’t stay!” The wetness in his eyes spills over, spiking his lashes and leaving wet trails on his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay.” It’s clear that the accident has frightened him deeply, and opened his eyes to the reality of working for what amounts to a celebrity, to all the danger that a position like that can sometimes entail, whether he’s working directly in security or not.
“No, no, it’s fine. I understand,” Elgar says softly. He isn’t surprised. He’s a little disappointed, maybe, because he likes working with Juan, and he thinks their friendship is getting somewhere. But no, no, he can’t ask Juan to willingly and knowingly remain a target. No.
Forsyth makes a sort of confirming noise, not quite a grunt, and nods a little. “Where will you go?” he asks, and Elgar can already see the wheels turning behind his eyes, the small ways in which Forsyth will use his powers to ensure that Juan’s flight into anonymity remains cloaked.
“Gil’s invited me to come stay with him while I recover. Says he’s got a great physiotherapist on tap.” Juan blushes a little as he says it. Elgar knew that Juan and Gil liked each other, but he hadn’t realized how deep the connection had been between the two of them. It reminds him a little of Kintyre and Bevel—he hadn’t known the depths of that connection, either, but Lucy says Bevel fell for Kintyre near immediately.
“I’ll bet,” Elgar says, and feels himself grinning. “But not with family?”
“I can’t bring this to their doorstep. Gil’s got security at his place; private neighborhood, great CCTV, and all that.”
“Admirable,” Forsyth says. “And leaving the state can only help. I approve.”
Juan blinks owlishly at Forsyth, as if he’s not entirely sure why the approval of a man he’s literally just met should mean anything. “Okay. Um, thanks?”
“Okay,” Elgar says, grabbing Juan’s attention back before his former assistant can start to question who Forsyth really is beyond just Elgar’s cousin. “Send me a postcard from La-La Land, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Juan agrees, tension seeping out of his posture.
Forsyth
The next morning, Riletti and Jackson escort us back to Elgar’s house. I was meant to have left after visiting hours were over at the hospital, but found myself too caught up in working out Juan’s safe passage to Los Angeles, as well as checking in with Pip and Alis, to actually leave. No one questions one more sleepless- and harried-looking man sitting in the maternity ward waiting room with a tablet in his hand, his clothing and hair rumpled.
Riletti shows us how to use the new emergency buttons that are hidden in each room of Elgar’s house, and then she and Jackson say their goodbyes. I know the place has already been cleared, and that there are guards in discreet places all around the neighborhood with their eyes on us. Yet I cannot help walking from room to room, checking the windows and locks on each door, peering into closets and under beds. I search for spell-bags, and curse runes, and ill wishes. The sorts of things the police would not understand, or may not notice.
Elgar’s office has been cleaned up. The window has been replaced. His fire-safe is back in the filing cabinet. But there is an obscene gap where his desk used to be, matched only by the one on his bookshelf. The pantry is also empty and still smells of bleach. I find nothing that should not be here, and it leaves me slightly hollow and frustrated, and feeling like I’ve missed something.
When I find Elgar after my search, he is sitting on the floor of the kitchen. One of the lower cabinet doors is open beside him, and in it, I can see cans of cat food, baggies of treats, and an assortment of small furry, feathery toys. Elgar is cuddling one such toy to his chest, tears rolling down his cheeks, apologizing over and over to a marmalade ghost that isn’t really here.
“Come,” I say, helping him upright when he has finished his cry. “I shall order in some dinner—I shan’t make it; Pip says I’m horrific at anything complicated—and we shall discuss our next move.”
“Next move?” my creator echoes, mopping at his face with a tissue. “What next move?”
“The Viceroy will come for you again,” I say, settling Elgar on one of the stools by his kitchen island. “He wishes revenge on you, and wishes to both lure me out and to hurt me by killing you. We know he will come for you again, wherever you are.”
“So, what, I’m supposed to just . . . wait for it?”
“Of course not,” I say. “We know he will come for you. What we must do now is ensure that it is at a time and place of our own choosing, that it is to our advantage.”
“Like a trap,” Elgar says.
“Exactly so,” I agree. A little bit of searching through the cupboards turns up a few take-out menus, and some instant coffee. I can’t help the sneer that must show clearly on my face, for Elgar huffs a laugh.
“It’s not that bad. When you’re out of the good stuff.”
“Has the doctor given you permission to walk about?” I ask, dropping the container of crystals right into Elgar’s trash bin.
“Yeah?”
“How close is the nearest grocery store?”
“About six blocks,” Elgar says, wary.
“Give me your keys,” I say. “I will not abide this.”
Elgar laughs a little more heartily this time, and I am pleased to hear it.
“A-shopping we shall go,” I say, playing up my accent and my imperiousness both for comedic effect. But it has the opposite outcome. Elgar hunches a little, dour. “What is it?”
“Juan always picked up the little things for me. And if he wasn’t here, he wanted me to walk.”
“Well, I am here to pick up the little things now,” I say, opening the fridge. It is barren of all but condiments and bottles of water that are inexplicably all half-drunk. “And it is unsafe to walk.”
“I know, but I just . . .” He trails off, wringing his fingers together. Normally, the physical tic is muffled in the cuffs of his many chunky-knit cardigans, but the doctor has forbidden them until his stitches are removed.
I shut the fridge and walk over to Elgar, placing a comforting hand on his unscathed shoulder. How strange that two of the three people I care most about in the Overrealm bear scars inflicted upon their flesh by the Viceroy. How infuriating.
“Elga
r,” I say. “He is on his way to safety, and he would not wish you to risk your own. I will check over your car, and we will drive to the shops.”
Elgar nods wordlessly, then winces, holding his neck stiffly.
“And then, after you have eaten, you may take your medication and sleep,” I add.
“What about planning the trap?” Elgar asks.
“It will keep,” I promise him.
Elgar
After informing the guards via the texting system Riletti explained to him, Elgar grabs his largest cap to hide the little spot on the back of his head where they’d drilled a small hole in his skull, and then watches as Forsyth inspects his car for black magic. And, he assumes, cut brake lines.
The drive to the grocery store is short, but paranoia has him glancing over his shoulder every few seconds, anyway. He freezes when they walk out of the parking lot and past the bench outside the entrance, but it’s occupied only by an old lady and her dirty little terrier. No man in black.
Everyone in his periphery is an extra burden he has to try to pay attention to, a potential new source of attack, and Elgar’s not ashamed to admit that he has a pretty tight grip on Forsyth’s elbow by the time they’ve picked up a plastic shopping basket. Forsyth pulls him around the store at as quick a pace as Elgar’s battered body will allow. He tires quickly, head aching from the fluorescent lights.
I should’ve stayed home, in bed, Elgar thinks. The wish is followed by a flash of memory—the Viceroy looming over his hospital bed, eyes glowing amber and filled with vicious glee, knife shining in the meager light of the monitoring screens. Elgar shudders.
“Elgar?” Forsyth asks, pausing in the middle of the cereal aisle. “Do we need to leave?”
“No, I . . . I’m fine. I just—” He looks up to try to reassure Forsyth, but all thoughts of what he was going to say next are knocked out of his head when he sees someone he recognizes. “Maddie!” he breathes, when he catches sight of her profile.
