Wallis addressed the group of new arrivals. “Lord Green Oak just called. He’s safe and he has Adina and Colin Willow with him. We’re heading out now to pick them up.”
Elise’s knees nearly went out from under her. Even Desmond had a smile on his face as he steadied her and kept her from falling.
“Come on, Lise. Let’s go get Dina.”
And Aidan. Fate had just given her back the two people she loved most in the world. She ran behind Wallis to the garage, not even caring that tears ran down her cheeks.
***
Aidan and the children waited inside the shop until the limo arrived with Colin’s parents, Elise and Meagan. Another hundred dollar bill had gone into the clerk’s pocket to allow them to stay in out of the weather with the sign flipped to Closed, and they’d all fueled up on chips and sodas and candy bars while they waited. Dina was sound asleep on Aidan’s shoulder when Elise ran in the door, Morwynna Willow close at her heels. Clive managed to maintain a stoic façade as he followed at a more leisurely pace, but Aidan could see the relief and joy in the other man’s eyes.
Even the clerk, whose English was spotty, seemed to be fighting tears at the reunion. Elise didn’t bother pulling Dina out of Aidan’s arms, she simply wrapped both of them in a hug so tight it nearly hurt.
“Mommy!” Dina cried happily, throwing her arms, which looked like elephant trunks in Aidan’s oversized pullover, around her mother’s neck. “Mommy, they were mean and it was cold and I want to go home. But Daddy saved me.”
“I know he did, baby.” Elise sniffled.
“He’s the best daddy in the world.”
Aidan blinked back what must have been a speck of dust under his eyelid.
“Tonight, I really think he is.” Elise hugged her daughter close and looked up at Aidan, tears streaming down her lovely face. “How can I ever thank you?”
“You don’t.” His voice was hoarse. “You just don’t.”
He glanced over to see Clive Willow slapping his son on the back. After a moment, Clive gave in and embraced the boy awkwardly. To Colin’s credit, the kid didn’t pull away at first—he actually hugged his father back. For a fifteen-year-old boy, that took guts. Aidan hadn’t spent too much time around teenagers—and it had been many centuries since he’d been one—but he knew enough to recognize a damn good kid.
Several other vehicles pulled up behind the limo—Wallis’s SUV, Greg’s truck, Ric’s vintage British sports car, Desmond’s newer, American model and an Underhill Industries supply van along with a couple of the cars Aidan kept at the portal house for guest or staff use. The troops had arrived. Aidan herded the others out to the waiting vehicles and paused by the cashier’s window. Slipping the man another bill, he said, “None of this ever happened.” He boosted the suggestion with a solid magical push. The man wouldn’t forget—Aidan didn’t have that kind of power—but between the magic and the money, the clerk would probably decide it didn’t really matter and wasn’t worth talking about.
Flipping the sign back to Open as he left, Aidan followed his friends and family—goddess, family!—out to the row of cars. After the women and kids drove away, Aidan turned to Ric. “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan’s a simple one,” Ric said with a grin. “We go take apart a factory, brick by brick. Do you know where the other prisoners are inside?”
“Yeah.” Aidan had gotten a crude layout from Colin while they waited at the shop. He laid the paper down on Ric’s hood and pointed. “There’s three—here, here and here. One cell on the far side of the one I was in, the other two between Colin’s and wherever it was the goblin guards entered from.” The others had crowded around and Aidan explained the factory set up, as well as the fact that in about an hour, the guards would notice the empty cells.
“Let’s ride,” Greg said. “Saddle up, boys.” George and Jase whooped and piled into the pickup with Greg.
Desmond shook his head in distaste, but gestured to Cynric and Clive to join him in his car. Wallis’s SUV was full of Aidan’s security teams. Hell, even Nigel, Aidan’s excruciatingly proper Fae butler, was in there. Kieran and Sean O’Shea from the queen’s guard rode with some of Meagan’s Underhill employees and the keyboardist from the Novaks’ band. As he climbed into the passenger seat of Ric’s Jag, Aidan felt a migraine gnawing at the base of his neck, even though he’d have sworn he didn’t get those. With this crew, subtle wasn’t going to be an option. All they needed were pitchforks and torches.
***
Elise rode all the way back to Aidan’s in the limo with a soundly sleeping Dina clutched in her lap. While she’d have loved being part of the strike team, she knew it was more important for her to be here with Dina. Nobody else was getting to her, not while Elise was still breathing. She buried her face in her baby’s matted hair and cried like a lunatic. Meagan sat beside her, smiling, while on her other side, Lana sulked about being left behind. Across from them, in the limo’s rear-facing seat, a red-faced Colin Willow scowled from where he was sandwiched between his mother and grandmother.
“I don’t see why I had to go home with the women,” he muttered. “I’m the one who knows the layout.”
Lana bared her teeth, showing a hint of fang. “Watch who you compare yourself to, cub. Being female doesn’t equate to helpless. Some of us are on guard duty for the non-combatants.”
The pale teen with dyed black hair, chipped black nail polish and skulls all over his hoodie looked impressed. “Are you a vampire?”
Elise shot out one arm in time to keep Lana from lunging across the gap between the seats. She didn’t know why, but most werewolves hated being confused with vampires. Current teen movie crazes hadn’t helped matters any. Glorifying the blood-sucking undead wasn’t a way to make yourself popular among the more civilized supernatural cultures—and the wolves could barely be considered civilized.
“Is that blood on your knuckles, Colin?” Elise murmured over Dina’s head. “I can take care of that for you.”
“It’s fine.” He pulled his hands in and stuffed them in the pocket of his hoodie. He nodded at Dina. “She’s a good kid. She never cried, not through the whole thing. And I think she boosted her dad’s magic. For a rugrat, she’s pretty cool.”
Elise sighed. She was too damn tired of trying to explain that Aidan wasn’t Dina’s father—especially since he’d been running around telling everyone he was. “Thank you,” she said instead. “I think she’s pretty special.”
“You know, I was in that place for three days and it never crossed my mind to blink the blocks out of the wall. Her dad—he’s one pretty sharp dude.” He turned to his mom. “I did remember to say thank you, Mom. I promise. And now I see why you’re always nagging at me to practice my magic. He looked almost dead when they threw him in there, but he came up with a way out in like an hour.” Clearly the teen had developed a serious case of hero worship for Aidan. Elise rolled her eyes but kept her mouth shut. Despite her own feelings and her tangled past with Aidan, she knew a boy could do a lot worse for a role model.
“Glad to hear it,” said Belinda, Lady Willow. The human woman smiled at Elise with a rueful shrug. “Raising halflings and quarterlings has its rough patches, but sometimes they turn out okay.” She ruffled her grandson’s inky hair. “Of course you have an advantage, since you have magic as well. I started out on a decidedly unlevel playing field until I learned a few tricks of my own.”
“You learned magic?” Meagan asked the older woman. Elise knew Lady Willow had been something of a mentor to Meagan at the Seelie Court.
Belinda shook her head. “No. But I learned a few nasty pranks when Clive and his sister were young. And their father made me an amulet that rendered me immune to the power of anyone related to him by blood. That helped a lot.”
Her daughter-in-law chuckled. “Heck, that would be handy for me and I’m the full-blooded elf.”
“That, my dear, is between you and Clive.” Belinda laughed. “I’m staying out of this.”
<
br /> Colin rolled his eyes and sighed, while the women all laughed. A few moments later, Meagan broached a more serious topic. “You know, even if they get the prisoners out, the odds aren’t good that Oswald and his upper-level cronies are going to be there. None of us will really be safe until he’s stopped for good.”
Morwynna nodded. “And even then, another leader will likely pop up in his place. We need to do something to squash this purity thing altogether.”
“I’m not sure that’s really it.” Lana leaned her chin on her hand. “Not if your guy is working with djinn and goblins. I’ve heard some rumors among the wolves. Seems like there might be another group—no one seems to know who—that wants all the power for themselves, and might be trying to get rid of any supernaturals who don’t work for them. I don’t know why or how they got hooked up with your elven purity movement, or whether it’s just in Detroit, or throughout the world, but somebody big is up to something.”
“Good gods.” Elise’s mind boggled.
Meagan winced. “Talk about a clusterfuck.”
The others nodded their agreement.
“What can we do, though?” Meagan asked what they’d all been thinking. “It’s like one of those hydra things—if you chop off one head, two more spring up.”
“I don’t know.” Belinda pursed her lips. “But ladies, it would be a very good idea for us to think of something.”
***
They stopped on the far side of the bridge while Wallis and Desmond worked together to cast an illusion of darkness and silence over the vehicles. While they wouldn’t truly be invisible, they’d be hard to notice if no one was looking. Hopefully the goblins wouldn’t be watching for trouble and any guards in the buildings still occupied nearby wouldn’t notice them either.
Once the spell was cast, they inched across the bridge and circled the steel mill, so the cars were all pointed back toward the city before their force—nearly two dozen in all, werewolf, human and sidhe of several persuasions—climbed out and gathered up their weapons, everything from axes to assault rifles, with more than a few enchanted swords between them. Aidan conjured his own bronze sword in its belt sheath, but led the way to the edge of the building holding nothing more than three pieces of paper. After checking the hole into his cell and seeing no activity, he climbed in and blinked one of the notes into the next chamber, on the side opposite from Colin’s, then estimated the distances to the other two occupied cells and ’ported those letters as well. Just in case the prisoners were sleeping, he added a flash and pop spell, to go off when the paper hit the floor. He put a pencil with each note and told the prisoners to place the paper back on the floor where it had fallen, as he wasn’t sure which of them, if any, had any magic.
A few moments later, he had his responses, though it took him two tries to get the third one from the right spot in the furthest. All three prisoners were alive. Aidan instructed each of them to move as far as possible from the wall and to cover their faces before he climbed back out through the wall and told Wallis where to set the explosives.
Five long, nerve-wracking minutes later, Desmond’s magic muffled the sound of three small explosions. Each had breached enough of a hole that the men on the outside were able to use tools to enlarge them for the prisoners to crawl out. Ric blinked in shoes and coats for each of the rescued prisoners and the two men and one woman were hustled to one of the SUVs and plied with water and food.
None of them knew any more than Colin had about the guards or their plans, but after a few moments’ rest, each demanded a weapon and to be allowed to help clean out the building. Even Kayla, who proved to be fully elven and the niece of a council member, ’ported in an enchanted bow and a quiver of arrows along with a leather jerkin and jeans to replace her skimpy purple dress. Michael Northwoods accepted an assault rifle and bullet-proof vest, while Lachlan of the Isles ’ported in a gleaming bronze claymore and a set of chainmail.
The werewolves had scouted the outside of the factory and determined there were only two entrances still functional. A third, the old loading dock door, had long since rusted shut. Aidan and Desmond each took half of their group to one of the doorways.
Aidan pressed the small chunk of plastic explosive on the door handle and stepped back, drawing his cutlass and blinking on his supple leather cuirass. It didn’t look like it would stop a bullet, but the enchantments on it were ancient and powerful. He waited for Desmond’s command over their headsets before he pressed the remote for the detonator.
There was a flash and a whoosh, and the door, now hanging awkwardly on its hinges, swung open. With Greg on his heels and another ten men close behind them, Aidan stepped into the abandoned steel mill.
The entryway was empty. Shattered chunks of wood and plaster separated the small vacant foyer from the main floor of the old building. Aidan stepped through into the cavernous chamber. While most of the industrial contents had been stripped, there were still a few chunks and scraps of rusting machinery here and there. A newer, cinderblock wall had been erected sectioning off maybe a third of the space, creating the cell corridor.
A burst of automatic weapon fire greeted them from behind a pile of busted wooden shipping crates. Aidan and his allies fanned out against the wall, returning fire. Aidan had no compunction about shooting back. These thugs had planned to kill innocent children and mortal law couldn’t touch them. Meanwhile, Desmond’s team had entered from the far end of the mill and was engaging another group, tucked behind some old assembly-line equipment.
When Desmond yelled, “Now,” everyone on Aidan’s team knew to shut their eyes. Their goblin enemies didn’t. Through slitted eyelids, Aidan saw the brilliant burst of white light that filled the factory and heard a dozen or so high-pitched screams. One small humanoid with greenish skin, pointed teeth and even bigger pointy ears than an elf dashed out from behind one of the crates and started spraying wildly with a submachine gun before he was cut down by bullets from Desmond’s side of the room. Goblins typically dwelt underground, or at least deep in the forests of Faerie. Their eyes were burnt by bright light. Right now they should all be blinded.
A pair of snarling shapes leapt out of a doorway on the side of the building where the cells had been. The two pale silver werewolves were met in the middle of the floor by the Novak brothers and a tangle of snarling fur and fangs ensued, while the humans and Fae rounded up the blinded goblins and clasped them in iron chains Wallis had picked up from the Queen’s guard. To Aidan’s surprise, there were two larger goblinlike creatures as well, with heavy brow ridges and bluish skin rather than green. Orcs. Thankfully, they were even more light-sensitive than goblins, so they’d probably been knocked out by Desmond’s flash spell. Well, wasn’t that an interesting addition to this mess? Orcs and elves were natural enemies in Faerie. What the hell had convinced them to work together?
When one pair of wolves split apart, Desmond cast a spell. Suddenly the paler wolf found itself enmeshed in a glittering net. Greg scrambled up onto a crate and leapt onto the entangled wolf, pinning it in place while Desmond used a crowbar to knock it unconscious. Once the wolf lay still, Desmond slapped a set of silver-plated shackles onto it, which Aidan knew would lock it in wolf form and prevent the regenerative healing it would get from shifting. Meanwhile, Greg went to help his brother. The two soon had the second wolf pinned, with Greg lying across its body and George holding its throat in his powerful jaws until Desmond could get another set of shackles on that one as well.
***
Despite Aidan’s instructions for all of them to stay gathered in his den, Elise insisted on taking Dina upstairs for a bath and to sleep in a real bed. The room Aidan had assigned her shared a bath with the room on the other side, but Colin desperately needed a shower, so Elise took it on herself to send him into the guest suite while she took Dina into Aidan’s plush bathroom. Once both kids were clean, they could sack out in the adjoining rooms, while the adults gathered in Aidan’s sitting area across the hall, or even right out i
n the hallway, on guard. Mind you, Elise figured she’d be sitting up beside Dina all night and she suspected Morwynna would sneak into Colin’s room as soon as the boy was asleep. Even if he thought he was grown, Elise knew that his mother still considered him her baby. She’d only been a mom for four years, but she knew that sense of protectiveness never quite went away. She could see it even in the way Belinda worried over Clive, who was over a hundred years old.
In fact, as they all trooped up the stairs like a herd of sheep, she could see deep, caring concern in the aura of every single person in their strange little group. Even Colin wanted to be back on Zug Island to make sure his father and grandfather were safe. Lana wanted to back up her cousins and Meagan, of course, was worried sick about Ric. Mairead fretted over Toby and probably Aidan too, as she’d taken on the role of mother to him years ago. The housekeeper and the butler were almost a couple. Even Fianna showed the strain, though Elise had no idea who she was so concerned about. Maybe her fear was for herself, about what would happen to her depending on the outcome, but something in her eyes said otherwise. Had she fallen for Aidan? Elise didn’t like that idea one bit. Wallis, maybe? A more acceptable option. Elise reaffirmed her intention to spend some time talking to the former Fae.
“Here are some more feminine toiletries.” Bronwyn, the housekeeper, blinked in a basket of tiny pink bottles outside Aidan’s door. “I don’t think the master’s scent would suit the little lass. There’s a nightgown in there too, that should fit well enough. I try to keep a few in all sorts of sizes for guests who lose their luggage.”
“Thank you.” Elise gave her a grateful smile. She tried to juggle Dina in her arms, but Meagan reached out and took the basket instead.
Motor City Witch Page 13
