Wolf sniffed and nodded to Portia Elizabeth. “That troll owes me.”
Portia Elizabeth stepped closer. “Finding her isn’t the problem. She’s female. Securing her cooperation has been difficult.”
So the troll was uncooperative. A gambling debt seemed most likely, but with magicals it could be something as simple as a perceived slight during an introduction. The troll most likely didn’t care one bit what Wolf thought, or what she might owe the spirit, and being a troll, was pretty much impervious to just about everything.
If I could spend my time gambling and ignoring a wolf-spirit crime boss, I would, too.
Portia Elizabeth touched my arm. “Hold still or this will hurt.”
“What are you doing?” I should have pulled away, but her green magic changed again and she wanted me to hold still.
She cupped her hand as if holding a ball. The magic of her dress flickered and a small, writhing sphere of red something appeared over her palm. Too solid to be energy yet too chaotic to be solid, it wiggled and poked and danced. Its red shifted from fire-orange to apple to blood, then back. It slithered, yet did not move. It collected, yet tossed all to the wind.
I was looking at liquid magic—concentrated, intensified, physical magic.
“Take your treat,” Wolf growled.
“I do not agree to this.” Could I run? Would I make it out of Crossroads Saloon alive if I did? What was the red magic?
But Portia Elizabeth wanted me to hold still. “We have to, Frank,” she said.
Wolf motioned at Portia Elizabeth. The resonance of her green magic shifted higher. A new pattern formed around me, one stronger and more complex than any she’d touched me with yet, and…
I stepped forward. The pup nipped at me again, but it did not matter. Only accepting Portia Elizabeth’s gift mattered.
I extended my arm, fist closed and forearm up.
Wolf leaned toward me over its meal, nose forward, and sniffed at my arms. “Good boy,” it said.
Portia Elizabeth slapped the red magic onto my skin.
The magic roiled and shimmered. It pushed and pulled, and pooled into a quarter-sized, unknown-red dot on my forearm.
A dot that grabbed onto my skin directly over one of the locations where my Dagrun-gifted tracer tattoos used to sit.
“Bring the troll to House,” Wolf said. “You have until Thursday evening.”
House must be the apartment complex, which wasn’t the issue. Thursday was the beginning of the Conclave. “I have other work—”
“Your elven nonsense does not concern me, giant.” Wolf wiped its fingers on its napkin. “You will provide your offered services, or you will become a pup’s meal.” It twitched a nostril in a very crime boss way.
Either I dragged the old lady troll to the apartment complex by Thursday evening, or the Wolf spirit in charge of Las Vegas would have me chopped up for its version of “swimmin’ with the fishes.”
Wolf dabbed its lips. “Do not attempt to remove your mark. If you do, Portia Elizabeth will know. Do not leave Las Vegas until your work is done.” One of Wolf’s pups sniffed at the tabletop. Wolf pushed it down. “Then we will discuss whether your offer of service has been fulfilled.”
Portia Elizabeth’s green magic swirled. I had to agree. I had no other choice.
“Yes,” I responded.
“I am glad you understand,” Wolf picked up the fork again and twirled it between its fingers. “The world is ever-changing.” It pushed at the meat on its plate. “The mundanes rub against magic differently now. New powers rise and the old must respond.”
It took a new bite of its meal and chewed, again staring at me as if I was about to snatch its food. “Out into the gray sky they shall go, so that the new may take their place.” Then it waved at the wider universe.
I opened my mouth to respond, but Portia Elizabeth touched my arm.
“Take him back to his hotel.” Wolf returned to its meal.
The pups jumped up onto the table.
They were bigger than Gerard and Remy were when in wolf form—I looked at their chests and they looked down at the top of my head—but they weren’t werewolves. They weren’t like any wolves I’d ever seen before.
The one on the left growled down at me with flat eyes full of fear. The one on the right, eyes full of hunger. Both had massive thick black ruffs more like lion manes than any fur I’d seen on a canine. Both were gunmetal gray and bared wicked, sharp, long teeth. Both growled. But they were not the same.
The fearful wolf carried simplistic—not simple—magic. Nothing elegant. It twisted and contorted around the wolf as if stretched thin.
The magic of the hungry wolf shook and grumbled.
Wolf pointed at Portia Elizabeth. “Go.”
She nodded and pulled on my arm. “Come,” she said.
“Dire wolves,” I whispered. Wolf had threatened to feed me to the magical manifestations of two animals that had gone extinct ten thousand years ago.
Wolf grinned.
Portia pulled on my arm. “Back away slowly.”
Wolf smirked, but the two dire wolves backed off. Portia Elizabeth bowed her head to Wolf. It nodded once.
She pulled me toward the bar.
“I’m to hunt that old lady troll? What is Wolf going to do to her if I find her? What if I refuse?”
Portia Elizabeth shook her head as if to tell me to be quiet. She put a finger to her lips and pulled me down the steps to the bar area.
A massive, dark wood bar with an equally massive overhang ran at least twenty seats down the wall of the saloon. The entire structure—from the stool bases, to the foot rests, the counter, the back of the bar with its mirror, to the overhead storage—had been carved from one piece of wood.
The sweet, woodsy scent of spring rose from the section closest to the booths, but as we walked along the bar, the scent changed to the warm humidity of living fields, then to the crisp, brisk air of falling leaves, and finally the bitter iciness of a blizzard.
The bar was one tree—one world—intricately carved for the gods themselves.
The mirror behind the bar reflected… magic. Maybe the universe. But I was not looking at myself or even the Crossroads Saloon.
It was too much. Too much restaurant noise. Too much dislocation. Too much being pulled away from my own mind and my own body.
“Stop gaping,” Portia Elizabeth said.
“I am not gaping,” I snapped. I stopped walking instead. “Explain what just happened.” I held out my arm. “This is the same magic as your dress, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
The magic coiled and roiled in its spot on my forearm, just as much as the not-right perceptions my eyes and ears were picking up coiled and roiled in my head. “It’s not dark magic, is it?” It didn’t feel dark. Nor did it feel light, either. It felt bigger than me, and old, as if it was too old to be either dark or light. “What is this?”
She shook her head.
“I need to know what’s happening. Why are you working for Wolf?” Especially if her dress was as powerful as I suspected it to be.
The resonance of her magic changed again. “Find the troll, Frank Victorsson,” she said. “Bring her to House.”
“Yes.” No, I thought. “I see your magic changing. I feel it touching me. I know what you are doing.” My head spun.
“Frank.” She gripped my cheeks.
I pulled away. My foot slid back, and my hand swung to my side and brushed a barstool. A chill hit my arms. We were at the end of the bar closest to the door, where winter drifted off the wood. “Why do you allow Wolf to control you?”
Portia Elizabeth pushed me in an attempt to move me toward the doors.
Sometimes my mind splits when a rage starts. Sometimes I’m aware of the ragings as I rage. I know what I’m doing. I hear my own voice yelling that the rages are not what I want. That I am better than that. That I left the anger behind on the same ice on which I left my father to die.
But h
e escaped, and so did my rage.
My hands wrapped around the seat of a barstool. It shouldn’t have come loose—it didn’t want to come loose—but my father also baked into my semi-dead body strength it should not have.
I threw the seat over Portia Elizabeth’s head. It flew through the glamours and magicks of Crossroads Saloon toward the Wolf’s booth and vanished into the shadows of the universe.
“I need the dress!” Portia Elizabeth’s red dress rose up around her like the shroud of death itself. “You called me a succubus. Tell me how I am to walk in the world and not be a monster, Frank Victorsson! I cannot love anyone. I cannot live. I destroy the worlds people build. I destroy lives.”
Her green magic screamed upward through its resonance range—it built and built until it, like the dress, rose up like Death’s shroud. “Isolation or death—those are my choices. Those are everyone’s choices! Even yours.”
“No,” I said. Isolation and death were not the only choices. “If you don’t want this enchantment, I can help. The elves can—”
The elves can… A memory sliced through my rage and hit me full force. A human woman. We were on the side of the road not far from my home. She had a green bike, and…
She was enchanted.
Portia Elizabeth stepped back from me as if she was afraid her magic would disrupt my memories—as if she somehow understood what my memories were.
She inhaled sharply. “Raven,” she said.
Raven was there, between us, in her hipster clothes and her much-too-knowing grin. She looked me over once, then looked to Portia Elizabeth. They both frowned.
And the last thing I remember was Raven snapping her fingers against my forehead.
Chapter 19
Two hundred years of sleeping like the dead has left me with a utilitarian view of my dreams. Such a view seems counter-intuitive at first because each night is a dance on the edge of The Land of the Dead. A single, slow breath is a step around an open pit of spinning ghosts. A flutter of my eyelids is a waltz with jealous shades who would make me one of their own.
I sleep cold, yet I should dream in humming adrenaline.
But a life lived properly is not a life full of dread. I do not fear my sleep no matter how I wish it were something other than the stiff, isolating thing that it is. I do not gnash my teeth and wail at my father’s cruelty. At least, not anymore.
So my sleep is what it is—the cold time when my body recovers its balance from the day. It may be bitter, and it may be frightening to the few women I have trusted to spend the night in my bed, but without it, my scars would not have faded. My bones would not have knitted and my muscles grown coherent. My sleep, like everyone else’s, is what keeps me alive.
But now ribbons of red magic wove through my pedestrian dreams of walking hotel halls and avoiding blond fake-elves. Ribbons that snapped outward from a brand on my arm toward unsuspecting elves and wolves, only to transform into a roaring maw that ate both the sun and the moon. Red ribbons that wrapped themselves through my sleep and choked away my cold and my rest….
Someone pounded on my hotel room door.
I gasped awake as if I hadn’t been breathing at all—as if a gag had been over my mouth and nose and no matter how my lungs tried, I couldn’t pull in air.
I touched my throat and my chest. No ribbons of red magic. No silk from Portia Elizabeth’s dress. I was alone in my dark room with my brain hammering on the walls of my skull—and someone hammering on the door.
The room was thankfully dark. My bag sat on the dresser next to the television. The curtains were pulled, which explained the precious darkness, but the sun leaking in around the edges suggested it was afternoon. And I had been crosswise on the made-up bed, in the same clothes I wore when we left for the apartments, like someone had dumped me and run.
“Frank!” Remy yelled through the door. He pounded again and the entire hotel felt as if it pounded with him. “Please tell me you’re in there.”
Remy. He was okay.
He slapped the door again. “Come on, Frank. Answer the door.”
My head throbbed. Why did I have a hangover? My body stayed within its baseline no matter how I abused it. My quick healing was pretty much the only attribute for which I thanked my father.
I slowly stood up. “Hold on,” I groaned.
“She zapped us,” Remy said through the door. “She hasn’t seen me for three centuries and I don’t even get a ‘How are you?’ She just sends me away.”
I staggered toward the entrance.
“I tried your phone but you didn’t answer—”
I swung open the door. “Can you hear yourself?”
He threw up his hands. “What?”
The hall light buzzed as much as it glared, and I squinted. “Did you ask her how she was?” This was not an argument I wanted to get into right now. I waved him into the room, mostly so I didn’t have to hear the buzzing of the fluorescents in the hallway. I was barely tracking what Remy said.
His lip twitched and he pushed into my room. He ignored my question. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
Because I was zapped, I thought.
I patted at my pocket. No phone. It wasn’t on the dresser next to the television, either. “The kitsune stole it,” I mumbled.
Zapped and zapped again.
“When?” Remy’s already high incredulousness set his lip twitching again. “How?” He dropped his hand to his back pocket and covered his own as he looked around me and back out into the hallway.
“They showed up when Portia Elizabeth sent you home.”
He stepped back to get a better look down the hall, then he gave me a once-over. “That apartment complex messes with time, Frank. We’re—what the hell is on your arm?”
I looked down at my forearm, then shook my head and walked toward the bed.
“Did the kitsune burn you?” His disbelief foamed over into a muscle-tensing anger.
“The kitsune didn’t do this, Remy.” I held out my arm again. No matter how much I wanted back my phone, we had bigger issues. “They didn’t give me the hangover, either.”
I rubbed my head. When enchantments mess with space and time, they also mess with memory, and I’d been messed with big-time last night.
I had yet another hole in my map of my life.
I pulled back my arm to swing at the wall, but Remy stopped me.
“Whoa! Hey! No more destroying hotel property. Mr. Lost My Hair has enough on us.” Remy pushed me toward the bed. “He’s lying about the ponytail, by the way. I bet a panda gnawed it off.”
“Pandas aren’t bears.” I unclenched my fist, my arm, and my shoulder. Remy was correct; I needed to breathe and not trip over my own potholes.
“I know.” Remy walked over to the mini-fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. “Neither are koalas.” He shook his head. “I’m going to find out what really happened. We need dirt on him.”
I walked toward the bed. We did need dirt on the usurper. But right now, I needed him to help me figure out what was happening with the non-elven magicals.
“Bears, my fluffy wolf ass,” he said.
This bear-beef with Niklas der Nord was going to be an issue—not one I had any intention of smoothing over or interfering with in any way, but an issue nonetheless. Often it was best to allow the wolves to finish their stalkings, and with Remy, it was best to let him be a… wolf.
I’d come face-to-face with a major Wolf spirit last night.
“We have bigger problems than Nik of the North and his absent hair,” he said.
I stared at my arm. “Obviously.”
“Do you remember what happened?” Remy asked. “You stumbled off. I was sure you’d already gone out to the SUV, but you weren’t there when I walked out. I couldn’t get back in to look for you.”
He pulled his phone from his pocket. “When I unlocked my phone to call you, I had twenty-five messages from Arne wondering where we were.”
He held it out.
&
nbsp; I peered at the screen, but rubbed my eyes when they wouldn’t focus.
“It’s Thursday morning,” Remy said as he walked in to my room. “We went out there Sunday night. They stole three days from us.”
“What?” All the colors of his screen swam around in much the same way as natural magic. “That’s not possible.”
“Oh, yes it is.” Remy paced between the dresser and the bed. “It takes skill, but a well-placed stasis spell can steal time.” Remy threw his hands into the air. “I called Arne on the drive back here. They were already on their plane. They should be landing shortly.” He slapped the wall. “Thank Odin’s eyeball you were here.”
Someone kidnapped me, stole three days, and… made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I held up my arm. “Remy, Portia Elizabeth did this to me on the orders of a Wolf spirit.”
Remy stopped with the bottle halfway to his mouth, then he exhaled and took a sip. “What? Not my wolf spirit.”
“Of course not yours,” I said. “It claimed to be, but it seemed too specifically Las Vegas to be the werewolf spirit.”
He frowned.
“That’s not the main issue here. I chased the kitsune and ended up getting kidnapped by Raven. She and Portia Elizabeth took me into the desert. Turns out Raven traded my offer of service to this Wolf spirit, who is some sort of local crime boss.” I laid on the soft comfort of the big bed.
“What’d she get for you?” The speed of Remy’s pacing increased.
“I have no idea. Probably some extra-shiny doodad.” Why hadn’t the hangover cleared yet? I was having difficulty piecing together what had happened.
I sniffed at my t-shirt. Probably because of the… troll scat.
The troll. I was supposed to find her. I had to find her now or I became dire wolf puppy chow.
“This was supposed to be simple,” I said. “We fly in. We find Portia Elizabeth. We buy her dinner, you two talk about old times, and she does Arne a favor.”
It was supposed to be Portia Elizabeth in red corporate attire standing in front of the Conclave Feast table with a laser pointer as she ran through slides detailing the positive impact of negative magicals on a local economy. Donuts, coffee, and a dose of cutthroat magical politics for everyone.
Elf Raised (Northern Creatures Book 3) Page 14
