My eyebrows rose nearly to my hairline, but my curiosity was not to be satisfied. “Bert never did like me,” the Unseelie groused as he hauled the suitcase in and went past me once more. “Even when I’ve paid him in advance.”
Considering the adversarial relationship he had with his Court, I had to wonder if there were any fey at all who liked him. And then I promptly squelched that thought. Never mind the proverbial ten-foot pole; I didn’t want to touch that notion with Hazmat gear. Or the corollary my treacherous brain was trying to propose, i.e., whether I was about to be the first.
Not that we had time for any such thing. Elessir vanished into my bathroom and emerged again clad much the same as the first time I’d laid eyes on him: jeans, a faded denim jacket, and well-worn leather shoes. (I couldn’t resist; I had to glance at those shoes. They did indeed have just enough midnight-blue piping on them to qualify as blue suede footwear.) More or less cleaned up and in his own clothes, he looked functional enough, even to Millicent’s grudging eye.
“You’ll do,” she pronounced. “Now let’s get the hell out of here and go get our boys.”
A sentiment with which I was well and thoroughly down.
Melisanda, apparently old-school enough of a Sidhe that she disdained using human technology when she didn’t have to, had no phone in which she might have recorded the address we needed to find. Nor had she written it down. I, about as new school a Sidhe as you could possibly get, made her give me that address so I could plug it into my phone and map it out. That she was prepared to recite the directions from memory or physically guide us there, I didn’t doubt—but again, not so much with the time to spare.
We left my Aunt Aggie ensconced in my living room with tea, her latest quilt to work on, and the cat. Our transport options weren’t great, just Millie’s car and the motorcycle Melisanda was using to get around town, but we took them and set off on the hunt for my missing housemates.
And I prayed long and fiercely to any power that might be listening that they’d be okay when we found them.
* * *
The address Melisanda had provided was in the International District, a part of Seattle I still didn’t know very well even after two months of walking the Wards with Millicent and Christopher. Even on my own, I’d been visiting all the parks in the city, since my faerie-sharpened senses had started driving me to seek out places where I wouldn’t be overloaded with noise or smells. I was beginning to need such refuges whenever I was outside for any length of time. Then, too, there was the power. Magic had a way of pooling in the green, growing places. Mine had a way of wanting to find it, even when the magic that infused a place didn’t feel familiar, like Sidhe magic or Warder.
Kobe Terrace Park was a place like that. With its lower stretches given over to a community garden, it overflowed with the living energy of every person who planted food in its soil as well as the plants themselves. Its upper terraces, though, were wilder. The cherry trees there had come from Japan before I’d been born, and I’d sensed something the first time I’d walked among them, currents of energy that had been formed somewhere far away, and which had melded with Seattle’s own life forces to make something rich and new.
The park was alive with kami, Jake had told me once. When I realized that this was where we were going, it didn’t surprise me in the least that the nogitsune wanted to meet us there.
We parked a few blocks away and came in on foot, with Melisanda gliding soundlessly out of the shadows to join us as we headed up South Washington towards the park. There should have been more light, what with any number of streetlights in close range—but that magic I mentioned, the magic that pools in parks? It has a way of making streetlights flicker and die when it rises.
Like when three Sidhe are out and about in the night.
Yeah, I admitted nervously to myself, three. Christopher and Millicent’s footsteps, cautious as they were, still sounded audibly on the asphalt. Nothing in Seattle ever reacted amiss to their passing either. But two streetlights went out when Melisanda and Elessir stole past them, and the bulb of a third exploded as soon as I got near it, showering fragments of glass and wire down upon us. As I swore everyone rounded on me. Millicent swore even louder and shot me an exasperated, “Damnation, girlie, you can shield better than that!”
I could, usually. But I was tired and stressed, and even from a whole block down the hill I could feel magic radiating down towards us. “I’m trying!” I snapped back.
Christopher offered me a hand. I gratefully took it, but even the comfort of his contact helped only somewhat. His magic was riding higher than normal too. “You can do it,” he murmured to me.
“If I may,” Elessir coolly interjected, “you two Warders are out of your depth if you think you can properly teach a Sidhe mage of Miss Thompson’s power.”
That got the Warders in question rounding on him in turn. Christopher lunged at him, stopping only when I grabbed hold of his jacket, recognizing a punch about to be thrown when I saw one. But both of us knew better than to get in the way of Millicent Merriweather. She stomped right up to Elessir, and while she didn’t actually thrust her shotgun up under his chin—she was far too canny for that—she did give him her most blistering glare.
“Do you think you can do better, sonny?” she asked, in a deceptively mild tone that was code for ‘Butch is about to blow an Unseelie bard’s head off.’
“If Miss Thompson will permit me. I do have a bit of experience in the matter of magic of our kind, you know.”
Narrowing my eyes, I reluctantly let go of Christopher, acutely conscious as I did that I’d started—entirely unconsciously—mimicking how Melisanda and Elessir carried themselves when I walked. Hell, I could notice the difference in how we all held ourselves even when we were standing still. “Yours is out of commission,” I pointed out. “What exactly do you think you can do?”
“Give you a better way to shield.” Elessir’s voice and expression alike were remote, but a spark of interest lighting his eyes pulled me perilously close to mental images of midnight stars. “Humans block themselves off from their magic when they don’t want to use it. You can do better.”
“Hello? Half human,” I reminded him.
“Tell that to your magic, darlin’.”
“When do we get to the part where you’re helping?”
He grinned at that, a sharp flare of frost-white against the darkness. “When you stop stuffing your magic into a box that can’t contain it. Reach out with it to what’s around you and see if it doesn’t settle right down. Touch your surroundings; don’t hide from them. If it doesn’t work, I promise I’ll shut up.”
“Oh, well, if that’s all it takes…” Snarky, sure, but I wasn’t in the mood to care, not when Christopher and Millicent were now both watching me with interest—and, on Christopher’s part, a hint of dismay. So I took his hand again and said to him, pointedly avoiding the Unseelie’s eye, “Let me know what this feels like to you, okay?”
Then I stretched out my power as Elessir had suggested.
I’d done this before, of course. To practice under Millie’s guidance, to find Jude, to give Christopher power for his Wards, to fight with the very nogitsune we were about to meet—any number of ways. But it was clear Elessir was talking about something different now. And when I relaxed my shields, just enough to let magic flow out into the earth and the air around me, I realized he was right.
Pressure so subtle I hadn’t known it was there eased at my temples. There was no wind off Puget Sound to the west, but a breeze-like coolness swept over my skin nonetheless, as if I’d just stepped in among a grove of trees. And oh God, the trees. All at once I could feel every one within several hundred feet, especially the great cluster of them ahead of us in the park. When my magic brushed against the nearest ones, in that moment, it was if I’d drawn in the first true breath of my life.
And when I felt that, when I let myself breathe, my magic ebbed to a background hum. It wasn’t gentle, and neither
was it gone; it lurked just beneath my perceptions, kindling stars deep behind my eyes, each one tiny yet almost too bright to behold.
“Kenna,” Christopher whispered, “are you still with me?”
I shuddered and then blinked up at him. “I’m… here. What did it look like to you?”
“Not like me or Millie tapping the earth,” he said, wonder in his voice. “More like you throwing out a net to everything around us. And then it was gone.”
Only marginally less surly now, the older Warder fired a scowl in my direction. “I don’t know what the hell you just did, girlie, but you’re blending in a lot better with the city now.”
“As she should,” put in Melisanda, “if she begins to use her gifts like one of us.”
The Seelie warrior’s tone caught me by surprise, and I might have gotten snide with her too, except that she looked and sounded completely in earnest. Stay on target, I commanded myself. Jake and Carson were the important things right now. So I squeezed Christopher’s hand, bobbed my head at Millie and said, “I’m good. Let’s do this thing.”
“Humph,” was Millie’s succinct reply. Then she waggled Butch by way of waving us all on our way and added, “What are you children standing around for? Move it!”
We moved it. As we did, I kept my hand entwined with Christopher’s, hanging on to it with a little more strength than strictly required. My magic felt steadier than it ever had before, but just beyond it—or maybe entwined with it—the night was singing. I didn’t know if I could bear its sweet, piercing harmony, and my man’s contact grounded me and kept me human. Kept me Kendis.
All the way up into the park, I refused to look at Elessir. Even in his weakened state, even without his own magic and in his humble mortal clothing, he was the night personified. He was star-shot darkness and the moonlight flashing on the human-wrought buildings and the living branches all around us.
And I wasn’t sure at all if I could bear his harmony either.
Chapter Fifteen
Once we entered the park, it didn’t take us long to find the nogitsune. A great stone lantern marked the park’s entrance on the eastern end of the street we’d followed, and there, far enough away from the tang of the cars parked along the curbs, I picked up a tangle of traces that were part magical resonance and part plain, simple scents. How much the others sensed, I couldn’t have told you. But all our steps quickened as we followed the walkways deeper into the park, away from the buildings to the west. Even Millicent, old as she was, kept up. Christopher and I deliberately matched our strides to hers, letting the Sidhe go ahead or keep pace with us as they would.
The boys were waiting for us on a curving path with benches along one side and terraced steps at either end. To my relief, Jake’s white-furred fox form was in plain sight. To my distress, he was standing clear and obvious watch over Carson, who lay stretched out along one of the benches. Only as we all drew closer along the path did I see Carson stir, which let my heartbeat resume its normal rhythm.
Then I saw the nogitsune. Two of them, not all three—the brindled grey I’d last seen threatened by Melisanda, in fox shape like Jake, and the woman who’d been the three-tailed black-furred creature who’d led the fight. She stood in human form and fully clothed. I had no doubt in my mind that she was more than capable of pulling off Jake’s trick of having her clothes change with her if she needed to shift.
As one, her head, Jake’s, and that of the other nogitsune snapped up at our approach. They’d caught our scent. Christopher and I glanced at each other, and by unspoken agreement let Millie pull ahead of us as we came down the steps on the path. Seamlessly, as if they’d rehearsed it, Melisanda and Elessir fell in behind us.
Jake pulled his head away from Carson’s chest as we approached, and in a blur of radiance, transformed back to human shape. Thankfully, he looked entirely unharmed, and he flashed us all a brilliant smile as he saw us. I couldn’t quite say the same for Carson. My other housemate sat up stiffly on the bench where he’d been resting, and that let me see the scrapes along his face and how he had an arm curled around his ribs. But he did at least look alert. I had to fight down the impulse to run to the boys and hug them both. There was protocol to observe here, protocol Millicent had clued the rest of us in about on the way down. Under the circumstances, the sight of them more or less intact would have to content me for now.
“We’re glad to see you boys,” Millie said. That wasn’t part of the protocol per se, but then, she was in the best position of the lot of us to play loose with the social niceties. Laying her shotgun back along her shoulders, the politest her stance ever got when she was on official business, she looked back and forth between my housemates and the golden-eyed woman watching us all. To the latter, she added, “I’m Millicent Merriweather, Warder First of this city. With me are my Warder Second, Christopher MacSimidh, and Kendis Thompson, mage. The Sidhe are Elessir a’Natharion and Melisanda of House Kirlath. We’re here to talk. Will Mr. Tanaka be translating for us?”
The grey nogitsune strode up to flank the woman, but remained in his fox shape, watching us with suspicious eyes. His leader let no such obvious mistrust into her expression, though her bearing was watchful, her chin held high. “I am Makiko Asakura,” she said. “I have enough English to speak for myself. I will say if I need Mr. Tanaka’s assistance.”
“That’ll make it easier,” Millicent said, giving her a gruff nod and another to the nogitsune beside her. “And your friend here?”
“He is my son. Hiroshi Asakura.”
I nodded to myself, noting Asakura as the family name here. Jake had taught me just enough about Japanese naming customs that I guessed that had the nogitsune not been addressing English speakers, the woman probably would have given their family name first. Other than that, though, I had nothing. I could only keep quiet and be grateful that Three-Tail—no, I corrected myself—Makiko Asakura was apparently bilingual.
“How about the one my Warder Second kicked out past the Wards?”
The nogitsune woman’s mouth tightened for an instant, a sign she wasn’t feeling remotely friendly, protocol and social niceties be damned. Yet no suggestion of that escaped into her voice as she answered, “My other son. Ryuji Asakura. He remains beyond your city’s boundaries, Warder First.”
“Which is where he’s going to stay until I’m satisfied there’s a reason I can let him back in,” said Millicent. “What brings you to Seattle, Ms. Asakura?”
“My youngest child. My daughter Saeko.” Now Ms. Asakura’s attention lashed out to encompass Christopher and me. “She was the child these two prevented my sons and me from reclaiming when she was running wild. We fear she is now lost.”
Shit. What had we done? “Is it true she’s a dragon?” I spoke up. Jumping in probably wasn’t wise, but if we didn’t need Jake to translate for us, it suddenly seemed best to cut straight to the chase. “How does that work, if you’re a nogitsune?”
She focused on me, nose crinkling, eyes darkening with impatience. “That is a foolish and impertinent question, elfling, coming from one who clearly should understand the joining of those of different kinds.”
Right. Duh. I clamped my mouth shut, kicking myself, since she was right; the daughter of a Seelie mage and her mortal husband shouldn’t have had a problem making the leap to other unrelated types of beings making their own children. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Elessir suppressing a smirk. Christopher, Jake, and Carson all looked as uneasy as I felt. Melisanda was stoic and unreadable, though half her attention was locked onto the grey-furred Hiroshi, and her hand was not far from her sword. Millie for her part shot me a quelling look, but also said, “The girlie does have a point, though, even if she doesn’t know it yet. By running wild, Ms. Asakura, I take it you mean that your daughter’s first change is coming?”
Some of the tension in the other woman’s bearing eased, hostility giving way to raw worry. “Yes, Warder First. Saeko is a strong child, strong as her father. Her strength makes her ras
h and fierce, and she will change early because she is so strong. I must find her before that.” She inclined her head towards Melisanda. “I sent this warrior to bring you to talk so that I could ask your help.”
My heart sank, and from the looks on most of our faces, I could tell I wasn’t alone in that. “We’d best tell her everything, Millie,” Christopher said, and when the older Warder nodded, he went on, “Ms. Asakura, I apologize for my part in our fight—”
“Me too.” This interruption, I felt better about. “We didn’t understand. I’m sorry.”
“But we’ve seen your daughter again, and she’s in more danger than you know,” Christopher finished.
On the tail end of his words the wind began to rise, heavy with ozone and the imminent threat of rain. Soft laughter rang out from somewhere nearby, and despite the high child’s voice, its very rhythm was thunder.
“Oh, there’ll be danger all right. You have no idea.”
We didn’t have to look hard to find her, since she was impossible to miss. With a sudden crack of lightning she appeared just behind us on the path—just behind me, in fact, and I whirled in alarm to see the girl who’d brought us all to this place hovering over a foot above the pathway’s stairs. Saeko had long, straight black hair like her mother’s, whipping loose about her small face in the wind holding her aloft. From head to toe she was glowing, and she offered us a smile that might have been adorable if she weren’t looking at us with the bone walker’s eyes.
“Konbonwa, okaasan. Konbonwa, oniisan,” she said, which made Makiko and Hiroshi Asakura both cry out, their howls of dismay eerily similar despite erupting from human and vulpine throats. Then she turned her attention to me. Her smile got wider, and when she slid seamlessly from Japanese to English that sounded way too like Jude’s, my skin crawled. “Hi there, chica. Give my regards to Her Majesty, won’t you?”
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