by Chloe Neill
“Leaving is what he has to do,” I said, not comfortable digging into my feelings about Connor any more than that. They were complicated, and he was leaving, anyway, so they hardly mattered. “The Pack has been planning this for a while.”
She nodded. “I’ll talk to your father. And when things have calmed, you should talk to him, too. Apologize.”
I would. As soon as possible. Because walking around with a bellyful of guilt was going to get very old, very fast.
“Be careful tonight,” she said, wrapping her arms tightly around me before I could respond. “We both want to handcuff you to Cadogan House, keep you safe. But that wouldn’t do anyone any good.”
She pulled back, brushed fingers against my cheek. “We are very proud of who you’ve become. But never forget where you came from.”
* * *
• • •
With those words in my head, I walked back through the House, found Connor waiting outside, one leg slung over Thelma. His arms were crossed, and there was a very serious expression on his face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.” He uncrossed his arms. “I’ve got work to do for Alaska, but I wanted to talk to you first.”
I didn’t like the second mention of Alaska, and still didn’t want to think about it.
“I wanted to talk to you, too. About last night—I’m sorry about the attitude. You were trying to help, and I wasn’t ready to hear it.”
He looked back at me, brows lifted. “Is Elisa Sullivan, the bossiest of the bossy, apologizing to me?”
“I’m not bossy. I’m decisive.”
At that, Connor rolled his eyes.
“But yes, I’m apologizing. I know you were trying to help, and I appreciate that you’re on my side. It’s just hard to take advice after dealing with this for a long time on my own.”
“I’m sure it is. The bigger point still stands: You don’t have to deal with it alone.”
I didn’t believe that for a second—especially since he was the only person who knew the truth and he was leaving—but I could appreciate that he cared. “Thanks.”
“Listen, Lis . . . Theo seems like a good guy, but the fairies are dangerous.”
“He’ll be there on behalf of the Ombudsman,” I said. “They may not respect me or Lulu, but I imagine they’ll think twice before going up against the entire city.”
“And Theo?”
My brows lifted. “What about him?”
He looked at me quietly for a moment. “Can he handle himself?”
Given the pause, I wasn’t sure that was the question Connor really wanted to ask. And it occurred to me—maybe a little late—that I didn’t actually know the answer. Surely Yuen wouldn’t send Theo to the castle if he couldn’t handle it.
I settled on, “We’ll find out.”
“That’s not a very good answer.”
“It’s the only one I can give you. We have to go to the castle because we don’t have any better options. Riley’s still behind bars, and my parents’ House is being used to further someone’s violent agenda.” I gave him a halfhearted smile. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to rescue me again.”
“I didn’t mind rescuing you the first time,” he said. And there was something different in his eyes. Emotion I hadn’t seen before and wasn’t entirely sure what to do with. “But you don’t really need rescuing, Lis. You just need a good partner.”
I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of his gaze, and my instinct was to turn away, to put space between us that would give me time to think.
“You don’t need rules for this,” Connor said, and grabbed my hand before I could turn.
I looked back at him, watched his eyes darken like storm clouds over a cold, deep sea, his gaze so intense he might have seen through to my soul—and felt the sudden, wild hunger that rose up in response to it.
Connor watched my face, thumb stroking the sensitive skin on the inside of my wrist.
Magic pulsed in the air, and it had nothing to do with my monster or the fairies. It was shifter magic, wild and rough and barely tamed. And it was vampire magic, dark and careful and dangerous.
When he finally released my hand, which prickled from the residual magic, the intensity in his eyes had changed, evolved into satisfaction at whatever he’d seen in my eyes—or the pounding pulse he’d have felt in my wrist.
It took a full minute to find my voice again. “I have to go.”
Connor looked at me quietly for a moment, and this time his face was unreadable. “Be careful.”
I nodded and stepped back, then watched him pull on his helmet and start the bike with a roar of engine and exhaust. And then he drove off into darkness.
SEVENTEEN
It was a balmy night, and although Theo wore short sleeves, the air-conditioning in his vehicle—a former Auto with ZERO WASTE and OMBUDSMAN stickers on it—was turned up to arctic levels.
“Warm, are you?” I asked him, climbing inside.
“Sorry,” he said, and turned it down. “I’m from Texas. Hard habit to break. Everything all right back there? With you and Connor, I mean?”
“There isn’t a me and Connor, so yeah, everything’s fine.” Wanting to change the subject and get this particular show on the road, I glanced at him. He looked cool and collected, if excited. “If things get bad in there, you can handle yourself?”
“I don’t have your blade training, but yeah.” He lifted up the hem of his shirt, showing the gun holstered at his waist. “I was with the CPD before I joined the Ombudsman’s office. I’m a certified marksman.”
I blinked. “What? How old are you?”
He smiled. “Twenty-six. I’ve been shooting since I was ten. My parents thought it was weird, but I was good, so they dealt with it.”
“And why the switch to the Ombuds’ office?”
“You ever read comics?”
“Not really.”
“Being a human, supernaturals are kind of ‘other.’ We didn’t really have access to them—the Houses aren’t zoos—so you make assumptions. Immortality, magic, strength. Comics, graphic novels, are how we know about those concepts. That’s how I got interested. I started as an intern, then worked the reception desk when Marge decided to retire.”
“And do you still think we’re superheroes?”
He grinned. “Most of the time, you’re a little more Bruce Wayne than Batman. But the lure’s still there.”
I tilted my head at him. “You looking to join a House?”
“No. My ma’s religious, and that would pretty much kill her.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, she’s old school, despite my efforts to the contrary.”
“There’s only so much you can do.”
* * *
• • •
We drove to the castle and parked outside, found the gate open again. The castle was dark, and the neighborhood was silent but for the whistle of a train in the distance.
“It’s quiet,” Theo said, pulling out his weapon, turning off the safety, and checking the chamber. When he was satisfied, he holstered it again. I belted on my katana.
“It was quiet last night, too,” I said, and we stepped through the gate, walked in moonlight toward the gatehouse. “But not this quiet.”
One of the doors was open several inches. Theo looked inside, then pushed it open all the way.
The gatehouse was empty, the room lit only by the shaft of moonlight. Even the torches were gone, their holders empty.
“The torches were lit last night,” I whispered. “This is where they met us.”
“You didn’t go any farther?”
“No.”
Theo nodded, pulled out his screen, began taking photos.
I walked to the doors that led into the courtyard and pushed. I expected them t
o be barred from the inside, for the gatehouse’s emptiness to be a trick or a trap, so the weight nearly pulled me inside when the door swung open, revealing a wide avenue of space around the keep, which stood in the middle. There were squares of grass and stone, raised gardens filled with vegetables and flowers, planted trees, and sitting areas where the fairies might have enjoyed the weather.
Like the gatehouse, everything was dark and quiet. The torches were gone, every window in the building dark, with only the moonlight casting shadows across the stone.
I took photos, then slipped back into the gatehouse.
“Anything?” Theo asked. He crouched near the wall, ran a swab along the ground, then slipped it into a clear bag.
“Nothing. No fairies, no lights. There are garden plots that still have food, so they didn’t take everything. But they seem to be gone. What do you have there?”
“Fairy dust.”
“You’re joking.”
He rose, slipped the bag into his pocket. “Entirely,” he said with a grin. “I’m just pulling a forensic sample.” He looked up and around. “It’s not often we have an opportunity to inspect a fairy house.”
“Glad I could help.” I glanced back toward the doors. “We need to check the keep.”
“Yeah,” he said, and followed me into the courtyard, then let out a low whistle. “This is impressive.”
“Yeah.” The tower loomed in front of us. It was difficult to estimate stories given the irregular windows sprinkled across the front facade, but I guessed at least four.
“You want to take the building or the courtyard?” Theo asked.
“I’ll take the keep,” I said, too curious to pass up the chance to walk through the fairies’ home.
“You okay going alone? And I’m not saying I doubt your skills with what is probably a really sharp katana.” He cast a wary glance at the door. “I wouldn’t want to go in there alone.”
“There’s no one in there.”
He looked back at me. “How do you know?”
“Magic,” I said. “There was a lot more of it last night just because there were so many of them here. I wasn’t sure until I walked into the courtyard. But they’re gone.” I looked up at the tower. “I mean, still creepy. Still possibly haunted and booby-trapped. But I can deal with that.”
I’d dealt with worse monsters.
“Here,” he said, and pulled a small flashlight from his pocket, then checked the time on his screen. “Twenty minutes. You aren’t back by then, I’m coming to find you. And don’t make me do that.”
“I’ll do my best.” I checked the time, then flicked on the light and headed toward the keep.
Theo didn’t need to know my hands were sweating.
* * *
• • •
The doors were unlocked. I pushed one open, slipped the flashlight into the gap, and spun the beam around the space. No movement, no sound, no fairies, so I slipped inside but froze just inside the door in case of a booby trap. Once again, there was only silence.
The room was tall—two stories of stone, the walls covered in embroidered tapestries, the windows covered by long velvet curtains. There were alcoves on both sides of the room, stairs disappearing as they curved upward. There were woven rugs on the floors, a long table in the center of the room flanked by benches, and an enormous fireplace with a hearth that was nearly ten feet long. At the other end was an ornate throne in gorgeously carved and gleaming wood. This was probably the central gathering room, the place where the fairies ate and socialized and took their instructions from Claudia.
But there was no sign of the fairies now, only the things they’d left behind. That included a fine layer of dust that had settled sometime within the last twenty-four hours, probably stirred up when they’d gathered their belongings and left the property. And it smelled green, like asparagus and freshly cut grass just beginning to decay.
I flipped a mental coin and took the staircase on the right, a spiral of stone steps cantilevered into the wall. No rails, no bannisters. I kept a hand on the stone and stayed as close to the wall as possible, then made my way up to the second floor. A passageway curved away from the stairs, and I stepped through and into a narrow hall with several doors on one side and windows on the other.
The window glass was wavy and bubbled, and I figured that was an artistic choice to better match the medieval feel of the place. They looked over the courtyard, and I watched Theo’s flashlight bob here and there as he searched it.
The doors were open to small bedrooms that weren’t unlike the dorms at Cadogan House. More gorgeous wooden furniture, including several beds with posts carved into climbing vines and flowers. Fairies might have been assholes, but they had really good taste in home decor.
The passageway curved again, and after a stretch of twenty or thirty feet, dead-ended in another arched wooden door. This one was nearly as tall as the gatehouse doors, which made me think I’d reached the queen’s room.
I listened for a moment, trying to ignore the thud of my heartbeat. And when I confirmed the room was silent, I opened the door.
The other rooms had been mostly empty, but orderly. This one was chaos.
The ceilings were higher than in the other bedrooms, two stories of stone that soared to a grid of wooden beams, with golden flowers painted between them. There were two tall windows, once covered by thick curtains. But the velvet, in deep and shimmering blue, lay in piles on the floor.
One of the bed’s carved posts was broken, silk sheets and thick blankets tossed aside. An armoire stood in the corner, the doors open, the contents torn out and spilled onto the floor, including a white dress that shimmered with jewels.
The dress Claudia had worn to the opening-night session.
I needed to find Theo.
* * *
• • •
I took photographs of the room, and made it back to the courtyard with only seconds to spare in my twenty-minute allotment.
“No fairies,” I said. “I didn’t have time to search the entire keep, but I found this.” I showed him the pictures I’d taken of Claudia’s room. “Someone trashed it.”
Theo studied them, brow furrowed. “Why would someone do that?”
“Maybe she had a tantrum. Or maybe she didn’t want to leave and fought back against it, and this was the result.”
Theo nodded. “Maybe they were angry at her.” He looked back at me. “You said you didn’t see her last night? That Ruadan was playing at being in charge?”
“Yeah. You’re thinking he wasn’t just playing?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t get why they’d have left all this. The castle is basically new, and they built it to their own specifications. It’s theirs and it’s fortified. There’s no reason for them to leave.”
“They could have been afraid Cadogan would retaliate.”
“Because they’re suddenly afraid of a fight?” Theo asked, and he had a point.
“They don’t make decisions based on fear,” he said. “They’re smart and calculating narcissists. They’re sociopaths that hold grudges. That’s what drives them.”
They hadn’t looked like they’d planned to pack up last night, which meant they’d made the move after we left. And probably because of us.
“They left this place because they wanted to be—physically—somewhere else,” he said. “We need to find that location and figure out what they wanted with it.”
“Do the fairies have other residences in town?”
Theo shook his head. “Other than the tower, which they abandoned, not that we know of. But they’ve gone somewhere, so we’ll start scanning the satellite feed, try to nail down their new home.”
He looked around. “Still a lot to go through here, but I’ll get CPD officers to sweep the rest of it. Let’s go back to the car. I want to update Yuen. Then we ca
n decide what to do next.”
“Get me coffee,” I said, “and you can call whomever you want.”
* * *
• • •
The scent of roasting beans poured through the skinny drive-through window at Leo’s, and I thought it was possibly the best thing I’d ever smelled.
“Chicago dogs. Pizza. Hot beefs. You have an entire city at your disposal, and you want cheap, drive-through coffee?”
“It’s not cheap, and it’s the best coffee in Chicago,” I said, closing my eyes at the first sip of sweet and hot and sharp.
“There’s a barista serving civet coffee in a hipster café in Wicker Park who’s weeping right now because of what you said.”
“I’m okay with that.” And I took another sip. Civet coffee seemed like the kind of twisted punishment Eleanor of Aquitaine might have come up with.
My needs fulfilled, Theo pulled the vehicle into an empty parking lot. Yuen’s image appeared like a hologram above the dashboard. The car might have been a recycled Auto, but it had a few tricks up its sleeve.
“Trouble?” Yuen asked.
“Not the kind you’re thinking of,” Theo said. “The fairies are gone. The castle is empty.”
Yuen’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean, empty?”
“They’ve abandoned the castle entirely. Left the furniture behind, but taken everything else. And they trashed Claudia’s room. Elisa will send you some pics.”
Yuen was quiet for a moment as he considered. “They trashed her room,” he quietly said, and his gaze shifted to me. “Thoughts?”
That he’d asked for my opinion made me sit up a little straighter and choose my words more carefully. “I don’t think she’d have destroyed her clothes. She’s too vain. That makes me think someone else did it. Ruadan, or his fairy allies, seems like the best candidate. But until we find them, we won’t know.”
