I had more important needs at the moment.
Magnus’s eyebrow arched as if he was equally surprised and annoyed. He handed me Sal and the scabbard. “She led us to you,” he said.
He’s mine, rolled from the axe. Magnus chuckled. “You’ve been chosen, my good man.”
I strapped Sal to my back. “We’ve already had this conversation, Salvation.”
The throbbing possessiveness ceased as if she’d shut a window. It was still there, I was sure of it, but at least now she had the manners to keep it to herself.
I reined Bloodyhoof toward Arne. “Send me home.” I looked toward Magnus. “I’ll need a truck.”
“No.” Arne watched the kelpie run away. “We will have a war if Hrokr falls—”
“He’s a Loki elf!” I yelled. The rage that this place whipped up suddenly manifested behind my eyes, and magic drifting behind the running kelpie shifted from his pale green to sickly orange. “He’s your problem, not mine!”
“Frank…” Magnus said.
I pointed. “He smells my lake.” He wanted only one thing—his bridle. How long before he transitioned into the part of the real world where he could get it? “He will do harm to…” Damn it. “To the seer if he gets away.” I reined Bloodyhoof around again. “So you send me home right now.”
“Not without my son.”
If he’d been on Bloodyhoof with me, I would have pushed him off, too. Intellectually, I knew finding Hrokr was a priority. I knew anger with the elves wouldn’t get me what I needed. It didn’t matter.
I slapped Bloodyhoof’s rump. “Follow the kelpie, boy!” The kelpie wanted his bridle. He’d lead me where I needed to go.
Bloodyhoof didn’t move. He tossed his head and looked to Magnus for instructions.
Magnus narrowed his eyes at Arne, but he spoke to me. “You had mate magic earlier, at the barn. I sensed it.”
“Yes,” I said. I’d hold my cool. I had no choice.
“It’s gone.”
“Titania stole it.”
Magnus looked right at me. He sniffed. “You will need to deal with the kelpie on your own.”
“I have Sal,” I said.
My axe winked into alertness.
“Magnus Freyrsson…” Arne said.
They were not telling me everything, and honestly, I didn’t care. “The kelpie’s almost out of sight,” I said.
Magnus stared defiantly at his king as he took a long, deep breath. Then he slapped the Yggdrasil tattoo on the side of my head. I didn’t understand the incantation, but I felt it creep across my face.
He’d hit me with another muzzle. I yanked on Bloodyhoof’s mane to turn him away. No more of this. I could still catch the kelpie even if—
A saddle manifested under me, and a bridle and reins on Bloodyhoof’s head.
The spell Magnus had slapped onto my face fully wove itself over my face, but not over my mouth. It covered my eyes.
I saw all the magic. All of it. All the edges and the ebbs and the flows. I saw gates and pathways. Magnus had given me a way to see the natural routing magic of this place. I could find my own way home, if I had to.
The same spell manifested over Bloodyhoof’s eyes, too.
Magnus swung Lucky around and slapped his hand across Sal’s scabbard. “Do what you must to deal with what cannot be, Salvation.” Then he pulled Lucky back and placed his hand on Bloodyhoof’s neck. “Do what you must to get him where he needs to be, Blodughofi.”
Then Magnus Freyrsson, Alfheim’s elf of prosperity and fertility, slapped Bloodyhoof’s rump.
The stallion knew what to do. We both knew what to do.
Together, we chased down a kelpie.
Chapter 19
The kelpie stayed twenty paces ahead. He wove. We dashed. He ducked. We lunged. Yet there he was, in the field, or along the stream, or under the trees, still twenty paces ahead. Every weave, or duck, or skid under logs allowed him to vanish from our view. He hid each time, attempting to use the magic of this place to out-maneuver Bloodyhoof, but Magnus had given us the elven equivalent of magical infrared night-vision goggles. The kelpie tried, but we compensated. Every rock jumped or railroad track crossed, we followed.
His goal was his bridle. My goal was getting to the cottage before it moved. Same place. Same Ellie. He would hurt her if he got there first.
And if he hurt her, I’d hurt him.
The kelpie would discover the level of damage my semi-dead body was capable of inflicting if he got to Ellie first.
The rage told me to kill him. To be the judge of his evil kelpie ways and twist his head from his body like I was pulling a cork from a bottle. Magical or not, that level of violence was also freeze-dried into my bones.
All the tales my father had told to that ship captain came with a grain of truth. I was capable of all the terror of which he accused me. But I would not be the creature he created. I would not embody his fears.
I wouldn’t embody the murderous glee of Victor Frankenstein.
Salvation wanted me to know that no matter what happened, she would always love me.
“You aren’t helping,” I said.
Yes, she was. I worried too much.
She was correct; I did worry too much. But what she worried about and what I worried about were not the same things.
Bloodyhoof galloped along, reacting to every slight shift in the magic around the kelpie, the ones that meant he used his magic to push his weaving and his ducking to their magical extremes.
I still knew deep down what was likely to happen when we crossed the boundary that took us back into the real world.
I had to catch him first.
We chased him through an open field, hopping row after row of harvested hay and chasing him around the big round bales. He vanished behind a bale.
Salvation and Bloodyhoof somehow compensated—the visible magic around us shifted—and the kelpie reappeared farther up, out from behind another bale.
The field also changed every time the magic shifted. We moved from the fields near Magnus’s farm to land that reminded me more of the fields that butted up against Alfheim proper. Same drop. Same bales of hay. Yet we were getting closer and closer to the lake and the cottage.
Close enough that we’d hit the fence at the edge of the property in no less than ten gallops.
The kelpie looked over his shoulder. He threw me a rude Scottish gesture. And he ran directly into the fence.
It exploded.
Inward first, then as a peeling back outward roll of wood and nails and snow. It exploded and ceased, or opened, and I knew exactly what was on the other side.
Chapter 20
Bloodyhoof did not pause. His gait did not falter. Salvation gave him a burst of brilliant horse confidence and he leaped through the hole with me on his back.
His front legs came down on the gravel behind the glass and chrome monstrosity that was the Carlsons’ house. We immediately skidded on the rocks, slowing as fast as the stallion could, so we didn’t smack full into the building’s side.
We were across the lake from my cabin, on the gravel drive that looped around my lawyer neighbor’s too-expensive vacation home.
Magnus’s magic-sensing enhancement had stayed in the veil. We were back to real world navigating by horse sense and my normal ability to see magic.
It’d have to do.
Aaron Carlson stood next to his BMW, a suitcase by his side and his mouth agape. His wife stood in the door of the house, face white as a sheet as if she was about to throw up.
They must have come up from The Cities for a long weekend and were unpacking their car.
Aaron pointed at the lake. “A man in a kilt hopped the fence and dove into the water.” He, thankfully, knew about the magicals of Alfheim.
I reined Bloodyhoof around. We were on the opposite side of the lake from the cottage’s peninsula.
The kelpie had a straight shot through the water. We did not.
“Aaron!” I said. “Call Bjorn
Thorsson at Raven’s Gaze. Tell him I’m chasing a kelpie.” I reined Bloodyhoof toward the road. It’d be faster than going along the shore.
“Kelpie? Damn.” He pulled his phone out his pocket. “Claire! You and the girls stay away from the shore.” He waved me off. “Go.”
Sal wanted me to know that she liked this mundane man, though she could do without his terrified wife. Terrified wives were not warriors.
“Please stop,” I muttered to my axe. “Ha!” I called and took Bloodyhoof up the driveway to the road. Thankfully the plows had come through, and the stallion quickly returned to a gallop.
I had no idea if we’d get there in time, or if the cottage had a way to ward off the kelpie. But we had to try.
We made the peninsula quickly and Bloodyhoof slowed to thread his way between the trees. We passed the red oak where the dryads had first appeared, then the leaning cedar. Each showed their normal level of natural magic. No signs of extra fae-borne contamination.
We broke through the trees into the space in front of the small fence surrounding Ellie’s cottage.
Her home was still here. Still solid with no telltale extra magical energy signaling that it was about to move. We’d made it in time.
So had the kelpie.
He sat on the fence next to the gate, legs spread wide and knocking the heels of his boots against the fence post with a rhythmic thump thump.
He sniffed. “There ye are,” he said in his otherwise lovely Scottish accent. “Here I thought I’d have to do this all by mah lonesome.”
He held out his hand to call Bloodyhoof. The stallion ignored him.
We should kill him now, Sal pushed into my head. Kelpies were a level of danger that could not be left unchecked.
The kelpie frowned. “Gie off th’ horse, ye ugly doughnut of a monster. Face me like a man.”
Riding Bloodyhoof gave me an advantage. “Leave before I snap your neck,” I said.
He laughed. “Oh, ye pathetic animated pile o’ corpse dung.” He slapped his chest. “She’s gonnae give me mah bridle, d’ye understand? She stole mah property, an’ she’s gonnae pay.” His face cinched up and he sniffed at the air. “I smell it clear as day, her protection enchantments be damned.”
Was he following the bridle or Ellie? I couldn’t parse how much of what he said was bluster from how well he could sense Ellie through the concealments.
“They all pay, the lasses,” he said. “Dumb little fillies, aye? Come too close, they do, and th’ loch, it calls me.” He slapped his chest again. “Someone’s got tae teach th’ lessons.”
I could offer to broker the bridle in exchange for him leaving, but I didn’t think he’d go without inflicting some evil. They all pay, after all. If it wasn’t Ellie, it’d be Aaron’s wife and daughters. Or Akeyla. Or Sophia. He’d find at least one lass to harm before he made his way back to his homeland.
One cannot reason with a kelpie, Sal pushed.
“Oh, look at ye! Big mean paladin. Thinkin’ about how to save th’ world, are ye? Good on ye.” He slapped his knee. “Is that lady of an axe talkin’ to ye?” He slapped his knee again. “O’ course she is.” He shook his head.
“Every elf in Alfheim knew the moment you touched one of their lakes,” I said.
He threw his arms wide. “An’ yet not one of your wankpuffin mates has come to help ye or your lovely lass, my dear walkin’ mound o’ goblin excrement.” He closed one eye and pretended to peer at me as if reading the world from my expression. “I wonder how come that is.”
He understood Ellie’s concealments.
The bridle is part of him, Sal said.
So part of him had, like me, gotten inside the enchantments. And now that part was no longer affected. But from the way he sniffed the air, his breaking of the concealments was only partial—or the cottage was actively fighting him.
Kill him, Sal said.
I knew Sal was correct—the danger this kelpie presented ranged well beyond the threat to the town St. Martin had carried in with him. It ranged beyond his clear and present danger to Ellie. She had me. She had the cottage.
If the kelpie got away, he’d go on a murder spree. “If I chop off your legs, you won’t be able to run to the lake,” I said.
He frowned. “She’s gonnae give herself tae me willingly. They always do, y’ brutish plum.”
A flare of magic moved along the far roofline of the cottage’s new sunroom addition. Someone with exceptionally high amounts of natural magic was creeping along back there, doing her best to keep quiet and invisible.
Ellie. She’d come out the door on the other side of the cottage and was sneaking up on the kelpie, who sensed her but couldn’t see her.
I would not look and give away her presence. The magic roaring up and over the roof rivaled the intensity of anything I’d seen from the elves and I had no idea what that meant, or how she would use it, or if she could, or…
Or if she’d get hurt.
And for the second time in all this, the hole left behind by my stolen mate magic became a gulf. We weren’t connected and I had no idea, or feeling, or gut understanding, data, words—anything—to tell me a truth I could trust. I was out here as blind as the kelpie and full of every single yearning and need and desire I’d experienced this morning but without the safety net.
No matter what I did, the certainty that the woman I loved wasn’t going to reject me had evaporated at Titania’s hands.
And there it was, the most familiar and agonizing of all the knives in my gut.
The kelpie peered at me. “Och, ye poor dear laddie.” He leaned toward Bloodyhoof. “Ye yearn.” He clapped his hands. Bloodyhoof neighed and tossed his head, but reading my emotions held the kelpie’s attention.
Ellie rounded the corner of the addition, her back against the wall and a baseball bat in her hand. Her magic coiled in opposite directions from itself as green, blue, and a scattering of red flame-like licks. She moved as a double helix of power.
I’d never, not once in all her time in Alfheim, seen anything other than mundane-level wisps of magic around her body. The cottage always drained it off at night.
It wasn’t drained right now.
The kelpie hopped off the fence. “Will she love ye when this is all said an’ done? I doubt it.” He sniffed the air, leaned back against the rail, and smirked up at me. “She knows what ye are. She loves the idea o’ an attack dog.” He sniffed the air again. “Until that dog kills somethin’ in front o’ her. Lasses dinnae like guts on the floor.”
Killing him might make everything he’d just said come true. Ellie might turn away. I put my hand on Sal’s handle anyway.
“That’s how ye show all yer ugliness, paladin. All those scars take on meanin’ when ye slice an’ dice, aye?” He sniffed once more and his face crunched up as if he was confused about something.
Ellie ran across the yard, bat up and aimed at his head.
I needed to keep his attention. Once Ellie smacked him and he was down, I’d get between them. “Shut up, kelpie!” I barked.
He glared and pointed up at me. “I ne’er kill where th’ lasses can see! I’m th’ beauty that lets them—”
The bat slammed against his right temple with enough force to knock him sideways. He rolled with it, twisting around and doing a header over the fence into the yard.
I slapped Bloodyhoof’s neck. “Jump the fence, boy!”
Ellie swung the bat again. “Submit, kelpie!” she screamed.
Bloodyhoof backed up to do as asked, but stopped.
The kelpie roared as he stood up. “Submit tae what, lass?” He rolled his shoulders. “I smelled ye but I couldn’t see ye beyond th’ fence. Nice of ye tae knock me in from th’ other side.” He rubbed the side of head. “Where’s mah bridle, mah sweet an’ lovely mistress?”
“Bloodyhoof…” I said. He wouldn’t jump the fence.
“I burned it,” Ellie said.
The kelpie laughed. “Ye did no such thing, sweets. I’d know.”
The place of the helpful fae magic is beyond the fence, isn’t it? Sal asked.
“Yes,” I said.
The stallion is like the kelpie. He’s seeing one thing and smelling another. That’s why he won’t jump.
“You can’t hurt me.” Ellie held the bat between them. “The rules say that whoever has the bridle controls the kelpie.”
The kelpie laughed again. “Let’s talk about what control means, shall we?” He quickly thrust his chest out to scare and startle Ellie.
“You gotta trust me,” I said to the horse. “You’ll be safe if you take the leap.”
Ellie’s magic condensed down toward her, but it didn’t respond as if she could direct it toward the kelpie. “Let the elf horse in!” she yelled.
The energy around the cottage shifted and the boundary at the fence pushed toward us as if reaching out to Bloodyhoof. The horse snorted.
Salvation pushed out her own inquiry to the cottage’s magic.
The horse can enter, Sal said. I cannot. I am dangerous.
So was I.
The kelpie slapped his chest again. “Ye need tae be specific, lass,” he drawled.
He was too close to Ellie. She held her ground, but the kelpie was taller and stronger.
I could drop Sal again. I could leave her behind. But I’d promised not to allow the fae to get her, and if the kelpie jumped the fence again, she’d be vulnerable. I was pretty sure I’d allowed the fae to get Hrokr. And that kelpie—
“Let Salvation through!” I yelled at the cottage. At the world. At the giant ash tree in the yard and at the kelpie. “Please,” I whispered.
The air shifted toward warmth as if the world had stepped back from its winter dormancy and decided to hold onto its summer life.
Bloodyhoof tossed his head. His front quarters tensed, then his hind. And the three of us jumped the fence into the cottage’s yard.
I don’t know if the cottage listened to me, or if something else did, but my horse rammed the kelpie into the ash tree with such force I heard bones snap.
I jumped off the horse.
Fae Touched Page 13
