by Susan Conley
Mona showed him the passage Abner had written that, after wading through archaic language, did seem to say Nic’s change was likely to be permanent if they were bonded and Tania was a virgin.
“It’s pretty likely he’ll be her first. She’s a bit scared of changing people. But as embarrassing as she’ll find it, I can’t imagine she won’t say something if that’s the case.”
Yes, Mona could imagine Tania, no matter how uncomfortable the conversation might make her, standing her ground to make sure things were clear before anything happened. Mona read further down the page. “If that is the case, we may not get out tomorrow. According to Smythe, he’ll have a ‘sleep of a deep and restorative nature whist his body accepts the changes spectral to his magical essence.’ I need to rewrite this into modern English.”
“We should show up at the right time anyway, we can’t be sure if and when it’ll happen. Speaking of which. . .” He pushed the table aside, placing the book out of reach. “We have some unfinished business of our own. Now, where were we earlier? Right.”
He wrapped his arms around her, bringing his hands up to cup the back of her head.
“Here,” he gently kissed the corner of her mouth, the tip to his tongue darting out and teasing, “is where we were.”
He traced the seam of her lips, while he leaned them both down onto the couch. The weight and heat of him felt incredible. Mona grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling him even closer, and chased his tongue back to his mouth. When they came up for air, Cart had nestled himself between her legs and was working his hands up the inside of her shirt.
There was a reason they shouldn’t do this.
Mates. Warders.
Mona needed to talk to him before his wicked hands made thinking about anything but pleasure impossible.
“Cart, wait. Talk to me about wards and Warders.”
“Not much to tell.” He kissed his way down her neck. “If there’s an elf who needs to be warded, a Warder will be around to ward him or her.”
“Yes, but—” Mona bit her lip. How could she ask this without exposing her concern? “How do Warders’ mates fit into all of this?”
Cart stopped kissing her and leaned away a bit. He looked her in the eye. “Typically, but not always, they’re the mate of the Warder. Since that’s not the case with us, I’m thinking your ward may need both of us to contain him or her. I’m hoping it’s not this guy. Him, I just want to take down.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t meet his gaze and glanced away.
“Wait.” Cart extended his arms and pushed himself all the way off her. “Did you think I was going to be your ward?”
She looked back at his now blank face. Cautiously, she tried to explain her reasoning. “I know that wards are typically born with the imbalance of evil but nothing about my training has been typical.”
Cart slid down to his elbows, his face now inches from hers. “You, know that’s a very good point.” He turned his head to the side and yelled, “Oh, Eternal Keeper of Folk memory, we needs ya!”
Randall flashed into being, sitting on the open pages of the tome. He tilted his head and wagged his grayed eyebrows at them. Gold chains glittered through his thatch of chest hair—other than that, his dark blue, mechanic’s jumpsuit with a Puck patch on the chest was remarkably restrained.
“I don’t do threesomes with elves anymore, although if you want to tempt me, by all means get undressed.” He sat back, propping his arms behind him and swinging his legs as if he was going to sit and watch the show. “Oh, and thanks for the new imps. The way that Lycoan is burning them out, I’m running short.”
His legs ticked faster.
“Oh!” Mona sat up, forcing Cart to turn and sit along side her. “That’s how he does it, isn’t it? He’s found a way to siphon off the energy from imps for his spells. I’d wondered how he’d gotten so much. No wonder the imps won’t go near him, he’s killing them off.”
“Like I didn’t already tell you that when I put the geas on Tania,” the Puck said.
“You said he was hurting them, this is a bit larger than that,” Cart said. He looked over Randall speculatively. “We knew he somehow managed to put tracking on them when he shouldn’t. I’ve never heard of anyone besides you being able to do anything that would affect imps in that way.”
“Yeah, well anyone who figures out where imps come from can control them.” Puck hopped down from the table. “Life was a lot easier when information was harder to come by and you could control who knew what.”
Where imps came from. Mona thought the imps they’d created looked like the specters she saw when they did long jumps. Could it be that simple?
Mona stood up and grabbed their jackets. “Cart, we need to jump.”
“Randall, what crazy—” The Puck was no longer in sight. “Shit.”
Mona handed Cart his leather coat and shrugged into hers.
“I’d like you to jump us to the furthest place you can comfortably jump us to and back from tonight.”
“Hold on.” Cart slid his coat on, despite his words. “I’m sure there’s a good reason you want me to use up energy we need to face the Lycoan. Mind telling me?”
“I want to see the beings in the time between the jumps.”
“Beings? I’ve never seen beings.” He paused, arm half in his sleeve, brows furrowed as he looked at Mona, confusion clear on his face.
“Well, maybe ‘beings’ is too strong a word. You know, those multicolored essences.” Mona stomped on her boots. She was going to be prepared for the Buffalo weather no matter what this time.
“I’ve never seen anything while jumping, except the swirl of the locations coming and going. Nothing in between.”
Mona blinked at him. “Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
She thought this through. “And, I’m guessing, you’ve never heard of anyone seeing anything?”
“Nope.”
She slumped against the side of the couch, perching on the arm. “The information I have from Abner is remarkable in its lack of information about imps. Any suggestions on who we could ask?”
“Yeah.” Cart finished putting his jacket on, his face grim. “Except you're not going with me to ask her.”
“Oh joy, it’s your mom, isn’t it?”
Cart didn’t bother answering, and instead rummaged in the desk. “Give me a list of questions and I'll do my best to get your answers.”
Chapter Eighteen
On the way to her brother's, in the boxy, military-looking SUV which somehow they'd been assigned, Mona flipped through the papers Cart brought back. He'd been surly and cranky, and ferociously intent on sex when he'd returned and she'd not gotten a chance to read through until now. The first page had a dozen questions, only one of which Titania Dupree answered. Cart's mother agreed there was a strong chance Nic would be the Oberon but left every inquiry about his power and strength blank. The second page, covering other topics, had more information. According to Titania Dupree, the void they passed through when Cart jumped was a special space the goddess created which held shards of the life force of deceased Folk. And since imps were created from those shards, of course the two were connected. The last two pages about Smythe and his ward were entirely blank.
Mona now understood Cart's frustration the previous night.
“You believe what my Mom said?” Cart asked as he turned off the highway.
“Which part?” She knew full well he was having problems grasping the imps as partial embodiments of spirits.
“The part with the imps being dead elves.”
“They’re not dead elves, they’re just linked to that spirit. Like a tendril of magic from them, not the whole self.”
“But it’s connected.” Cart pulled on to Nic's driveway and turned off the engine.
“I think so, yes.”
“I have a question then." He turned and looked at her, his finger tapping on the steering wheel in agitation. "If this Edward guy, and I have to think it’s
him, is killing off imps, how is that affecting the spirits? Are they gone then too?”
Mona stared at him. She’d been so caught up in discovering where imps came from, she hadn’t thought about what the Lycoan was doing to them. If Cart was correct, and there was a tie-in with elf spirits, they had their explanation of why the Puck and goddess were involved. She didn't mention her suspicion that someone was augmenting the Lycaon’s spells. When they tracked him down, she'd confront whomever helped him and deal with them there.
“I don’t know. I guess the question going forward is, does the answer make a difference?”
“No, I guess not. We want him to stop, no matter what. Lets get these guys and get going.” Cart opened his door, letting in a blast of ice cold air.
The lights were out and no on seemed to be up so Mona let them into Nic’s house.
“Thinking he’s got the sleep thing going on,” Cart said.
Mona sure hoped so, because she didn’t remember Nic oversleeping, ever. She headed up the stairs.
“You sure you want to do this?” Cart asked as he followed her up.
Her first chance ever to wake her brother up? Okay, she might be waking Tania up too, but she’d take the chance.
“Nic?” Mona called when they reached Nic’s bedroom door.
“Just a minute!” Tania called. They heard a bit of scrambling then, “Come in.”
In the middle of a bed draped with flowers and flitting with pixies, Tania sat, trying to shake Nic awake. He wasn’t budging.
Mona and Cart’s gasps echoed across the room. This scene, Mona knew it. The quote from Shakespeare sprang to mind.
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania, sometime of the night.
The pixies danced as she recited the lines, then swooped up to blink out of sight.
“Holy moly, cuz, what’d you do?” Cart had stepped into the room and stood, arms akimbo, surveying the imps’ decorations.
Tania copied his stance and raised her eyebrows at him. Really, they stood in the middle of Nic’s bedroom, she was clearly only wearing a robe. . .what did Cart think his cousin and Nic had done?
He had the grace to blush. “Yeah, okay, about that, you all going to be ready in about half an hour? I’ll rustle up something for us to eat on the way.”
“Once I wake Nic up we shouldn’t be long.”
Mona came and stood by the bed, knowing full well nothing was likely to work, but unable to help herself. She leaned over his ear and yelled, “Yo! Bro! You kidding around here?”
He flinched some, and he turned away from her, mumbling something dark.
Mona kept her face impassive, although a little bit of worry did seep through. “He’s never like this. I mean never. After drinking, after he got his tonsils out—which he did at twenty-five—he always just springs up wide awake. Usually it’s rather annoying.”
She started to bite on her fingernail and looked around the room, her other hand tracing lines in the air. Oh my, but was there a lot of magic in this room. She remembered what the tome had said. He might be out for hours and they didn’t have hours.
“Um,” Mona was sure she turned beet red as she asked the question, “if you don’t mind my asking, was this your first time?”
Tania, she was sure, now matched her blush.
Cart muttered something about checking downstairs. He and Tania exchanged a look before he headed out. Mona didn’t want to ask what that was all about.
Still not looking at Mona, Tania replied. “Yes.”
Mona gritted her teeth and pursued the question. “I mean, not just with Nic, but your very first time?”
Tania nodded.
“Oh dear, he may be asleep for a while then.”
The Maven looked over at Nic and back at Mona, curiosity clearly giving way to her discomfort.
“Okay, tell me why.” Tania sat on the edge of the bed.
“Well, I was talking to Cart last night. You’d both said that perhaps his mother had been trying to accomplish . . . something during her trysts. So I thought ‘There’s Titania, Puck, where’s the Oberon?’ As you can guess, I’m a huge fan of Shakespeare.”
“There hasn’t been an Oberon in almost five hundred years,” Tania replied. She blinked and looked back at Nic. “An Oberon is like a Maven and Titania and Puck all rolled into one, able to do all of their magic and more.”
She managed to look both scared and thrilled at the thought. Mona wondered if she knew more. If so, she wasn’t sharing.
“Yes, that’s what Cart said too.”
Tania gazed off into the distance for a minute before turning back to Mona, her face scrunched with perplexity.
“I’m not sure I agree with you, but I’m also not sure I disagree.” Tania laughed uncomfortably. “I guess I’m just not sure about any of it. Wait,” she added, jumping up and grabbing Mona’s arm. “How long do you think he’s going to be asleep? We need to get going.”
Mona watched her steel herself, clearly coming to a decision before Mona could come up with an answer. Not that Mona had any clue how long the sleep would last.
“Never mind.” Tania let go and straightened the collar of her robe, then retied the sash. “We’re going to have to go on without him. He can catch up. He knows the coordinates and the Folk will help him. Even more so if what you think is true.” She shooed Mona out. “Go, I’ll join you as soon as I get ready.”
Mona headed downstairs to find Cart pacing the hall.
"Your brother wake up?” Cart headed back to the kitchen. He’d already started a carafe of coffee..
“No and my guess is, due to the circumstances, it may be a bit.”
“Shit. Do we wait? I have to tell you, I don’t want to. I’m itching go, to even as tired as I am.”
Mona agreed, she was fighting the compulsion already to jump in the monstrosity of a vehicle and head out.
“Tania’s all for going now.”
Cart merely grunted as she coffee into a thermos. Before she'd put the cap on, Tania’s footsteps were on the stairs.
"Ready? Let's go."
Mona and Cart scrambled to follow her. She was already in the car before they made it out the door.
“This yours?” Tania held up a posy of flowers from where she sat in the middle of the back seat.
Mona glanced at them. They were not rudbeckia or daisies or any flower she knew, although they looked close.
“Nope. Maybe the imps left it?”
Tania took a tentative sniff at the small bouquet and wrinkled her nose. Mona watched in the rearview mirror. Over half looked like they’d died and dried already. The flaking leaves were crumbling all over the upholstery.
“A very odd gift, but welcome,” Tania said as she carefully set it down. From one of her pockets she pulled out an empty sandwich bag. Placing the bag over the top, she shook the dried flowers and leaves causing them to fall off the stem and into the bag. She patted herself down before slipping the bag into the cargo pocket on her right thigh.
They drove north in the rosy tinted chill of the dawn. The first time Tania jumped them all in the car Mona bit back on her squeal. She had no idea you could move a whole car. Tania only did it twice more, both times, Mona realized as they arrived, to markers she’d placed along the road sometime in the past.
After they crossed the border—in record time, but then it was clear imps were rearranging things to their liking—they found themselves on a rural highway. Soon the signs on the roads made it clear that they were heading up to Algonquin.
The monstrous beast of a car needed gas so they stopped and stretched. Mona looked around. A bank of blue-gray clouds sedately moved toward them, coming from the direction they were heading. Snow, she was sure. No magic in sky that she could see, thankfully, but the heavy weight of the clouds
seemed to indicate there’d be plenty of snow without any interference.
Mona headed over to Cart, to find him crouched down between two cars and talking to a Feeorin. Notoriously shy of women, the squirrel-sized human-like creatures loved the northern cold and the wooded areas around here. Mona hung back, not wanting to scare the blue-black being. The small man nodded at Cart, then bowed to her before scampering off under the chassis of the parked cars.
“Salamanders came through en masse about an hour ago.”
“We missed that clue, didn’t we? We could have just stayed and followed them.”
Cart threw his arm over her shoulders as they headed back to the car and Tania, who was standing on the far side. “Only if we want to get there after them. I’m still hoping to get there before.”
Twenty minutes later, the snow started. A light dusting of flurries that soon became dense white and shimmered in the headlights. The only good news was that nothing was accumulating. Yet.
“So,” Tania asked, “what information did you all find out last night?”
“Well. . .” Mona stretched the word to see if Cart wanted to jump in and say he'd visited his mother. He didn't say a thing. “You mean aside from the Oberon thing? I tried to look up more information on Lycoan. That was a little difficult, given the title wasn’t used last time.”
“Last time they just used the name the non-Folk gave him. I’d only ever heard him called Jack the Ripper.” Tania looked thoughtful.
“I think naming him is helpful,” Cart added.
The big vehicle slowed down more and they kept their eyes on the road and woods. By the time Cart turned up the last route, everything had been recoated in new snow and anything loose was being kicked around by the wind.
“If nothing else, knowing his name helps us know his powers.” Tania clearly had been thinking on the naming thing the whole while.
“Unfortunately, from what we could track down, his powers weren’t really clear,” Mona said. She mentally placed the people she knew with powers in a hierarchy, using her hands to help her go through the levels. Hopefully she was right in placing her brother at the top of the heap.
