Demelza moved forward, her face flushed and furious. “Callie? There is no Calliopia. They stole my baby girl! You have no idea how that hurts a mother. And now you take her away again?”
“I have to. She doesn’t belong here and you will kill her. I can’t stand by and let that happen.”
“Better I kill her than she is raised by other kin!”
For the first time, Reg thought she understood what her social workers went through, taking children away from their parents, shopping them back and forth from one family to another trying to find the home that would work the best. Forever hurting either the bio family, the foster family, or the child. Always the bad guy, no matter how hard they tried to protect the children.
“I can’t let you kill her. Her fairy family loves her. They will be happy to have her back. Wouldn’t you rather know that she was happy and well?”
“No!”
Until then, she’d just been trying to hold Demelza off to reason with her. Reg gave up on that and managed to get ahold of Demelza’s arm, closing her hand tightly around it. Her blood was flowing freely, and Demelza shrieked, trying to shake loose. Reg held on as long as she was able, squeezing the blood out until Demelza’s arm began to smoke. Horrified, Reg released her.
Demelza stepped back, still screaming. Her arm was blackened and a tight coil of smoke rose from it, the smell acrid and nauseating. Demelza began to chant in her pixie tongue, and her husband and son and the remaining fighters started to circle, gathering closer and closer together. Reg watched them with fascination. As she and Corvin were in the shadow world, the pixies couldn’t hide from them. They circled and quieted, and then eventually slunk off, sticking to the shadowy walls of the tunnels.
“We did it!” Reg cheered. “We fought them off.”
“That might not be all,” Corvin warned. “They may be falling back to a new position and have other, fresh fighters ready.”
Starlight gave a yowl. Reg looked down at him. She’d completely forgotten him in the fight, but it didn’t look like the pixies had forgotten him. His fur was ruffled and he had a torn ear. But his fangs were bloody and he looked remarkably smug.
“What is it, cat?” Corvin demanded.
Starlight looked this way and that, sniffing the air, his ears rotating like little radar dishes. Then he started out again, leading them once more.
“Can you get us out of here without another fight?” Corvin asked.
Starlight looked back at him. While Reg hoped that the answer was yes, Starlight didn’t look confident that he’d be able to avoid another pixie attack. They were, after all, on the pixies’ home ground.
“Are you okay?” Jessup asked Calliopia, as they gathered their wits and followed Starlight’s lead. The knife in Jessup’s hand was bloody, and was no longer neatly encased in a sealed evidence bag. Jessup was going to be in trouble with the police department.
“I shall fight more,” Callie declared, marching forward.
In spite of having fought barehanded, she seemed to be in remarkably good shape. Luckily for them, the pixies tended to eschew blades and rely instead on their hands, pikes, or staves. Perhaps there was less danger of injury from fairy blood if they used bludgeons rather than sharpened weapons.
⋆ Chapter Twenty-Nine ⋆
T
hey wound their way through the tunnels. In a couple of places, Reg was sure they weren’t going to be able to get through the cracks and crevices Starlight found, but they squeezed and forced their way through, and in the end, none of them got stuck. At least not permanently.
They stumbled out into the light. The sun streamed down on them, blinding after the darkness of the underground. Reg looked around for their car, but it was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t recognize any landmarks.
Jessup appeared to have the same dilemma. She looked this way and that, but her car was not there. She’d said before that she only knew one way in, and they’d now found two other routes. The trouble was, she didn’t know the way home.
Reg sat on a curb, breathing and getting used to the light of the aboveground. Calliopia was going through some kind of ritualistic greeting of the sun, and after so many days underground, Reg couldn’t blame her. Having been inside Callie’s mind, she knew how the girl had despaired of ever seeing the aboveground again.
“Which way is home?” Calliopia asked Jessup. “I must get home.”
“I don’t know. I have no idea where I am.”
Starlight wandered in circles, sniffing at bits of grass that had forced their way up through the cracks in the sidewalks. But he didn’t seem to have any immediate ideas of how to get Callie home. Jessup reached into her pocket to retrieve her cell phone, but it wouldn’t work. Not just no signal, but the screen was smashed and she couldn’t wake it up.
Jessup sat down on the curb next to Reg, and stared at Reg’s feet in the gutter. “Well, we got you out. Now how do we turn you back into human beings? I assume you don’t want to go through the remainder of your lives as beetles.”
Reg reached out to touch Jessup. The air got thicker and began to buzz and vibrate as she got closer. Reg touched Jessup with the very tips of her fingertips, just the lightest brushing contact she could manage. Jessup jumped and looked to her side. She squinted her eyes.
“You’re there,” she said, frowning. Her eyes followed Reg’s shape from head to toe. She could see her! “Barely,” Jessup said. “Like a shadow.”
Reg nodded her head. “Yes, yes. We’re here. Just in the shadow world.”
Jessup looked at the other beetle and followed Corvin’s shape up. “Corvin too? But you’re very hard to see.” Jessup held her hand out tentatively to touch the shadows, but didn’t reach far enough. Maybe, like Reg and Corvin, she could feel that boundary around them.
“So what do I do to get you back…?” Jessup pondered. She looked at Calliopia. “Do you know? You must know something about pixie magic.”
Callie rolled her eyes. “I am not a pixie. I know nothing about their magic.”
“You’re not a pixie now, but you were born one, and you’ve just spent a week with them. And since fairies and pixies are enemies, you must know something about each other’s magic. How can you fight an enemy you don’t know?”
The corners of Callie’s lips curled up slightly. “You are not as stupid as you look.”
Reg winced. “Ouch!”
Corvin chuckled beside her. “From a fairy, that’s actually a sincere compliment. They consider us ugly, stupid, and clumsy. Not a surprise, since they are gifted in so many ways. Some of the social niceties don’t translate…”
Calliopia considered Jessup. “The pixies have to appear to fight us,” she suggested.
“They can choose to appear. But Reg and Corvin can’t choose, or they would appear now. There must be a way to make them visible.”
Calliopia tugged on her ear, thinking about it. “If we can make them appear, then I can go home?”
“Sure,” Jessup said. “If I could talk to them, we could figure out where we are and how to get out of here.”
Reg was sure Jessup could figure out on her own how to get out of the broken-down slum they had surfaced in and back to her car or some other form of transportation. She certainly knew the area better than Reg. But if Calliopia saw the exchange of information as reciprocal, she seemed more inclined to help. Fairies weren’t well-known for helping humans—at least not in the fairy tales Reg was familiar with.
“This one talks in my head,” Callie gestured toward Reg.
“That would be Reg. She’s been helping me to find you. She was cu—she has a strong psychic gift. Can they tell us what to do to help them?”
Reg looked at Corvin, but he shook his head. “I would need to do some research. If we could get back to my library…”
Reg touched Callie’s mind. Unlike Ruan, Calliopia didn’t seem to mind Reg’s presence there. She listened to Reg for a moment, her head cocked slightly.
“The warlock does
not know what to do,” Callie reported with amusement. “He wants to read.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Jessup said impatiently. “Tell me what you know, Calliopia. There must be something we can do.”
“You are not going to like it.”
“No doubt. Would pixie blood do the trick? We’ve got plenty of that.”
Calliopia considered this seriously for a minute, chewing on a strand of hair, then shook her head. “They vanish their wounded. Blood does not keep them visible.”
“Too bad. So? Teach me what you know. How can I get them back?”
“You must hold on to her and not look away.”
Reg and Corvin exchanged glances. That didn’t sound too awful. Reg had been bracing herself for some complicated and lengthy spell, having to drink horrible tasting potions, or to lie naked in the Florida sun for a full day.
“But I get a shock when I touch them,” Jessup pointed out.
Calliopia shrugged her shoulders. “I said you would not like it.”
“Well, I’m not going to like it any better if I wait.” Jessup reached toward Reg. Reg braced herself for the jolt of electricity.
“Wait,” Corvin said.
Reg pulled away from Jessup. “What?”
“She should do me first. If it’s too hard on either of us, I can do the research to see if there’s another way, before putting you through the same thing. I can help Marta get out of here safely, you can’t.”
“How can you help her?”
He looked around covertly, as if afraid he might be overhead. “I know this place. I have contacts here. I can get us out.”
Reg looked at him, suspicious. Corvin Hunter, she had discovered, was all about Corvin Hunter. If he wanted to go first, it was a fair bet that his reasons were selfish and it wasn’t her welfare he was concerned about.
“Why really?”
“What do you mean, really? Because I want to get out of this shadow world and back where I belong. And to get all of us out of this place. It isn’t the best place for a couple of women to be hanging around by themselves, even if one of them is a cop.”
“They’re not alone.”
“Must you argue with me about it? We’re both going to get changed, but one of us has to go first. Logically, that should be me.”
She didn’t like his logic, but she couldn’t dispute it. She wasn’t going to be of any help to Detective Jessup. If only one of them could be changed at first, then it should be the person who could help her.
“Fine,” she said grudgingly. “You go first.”
They moved around each other, swapping places. Jessup couldn’t see them clearly, and squinted at the movements of the shadows. “What’s going on? Is something wrong?”
“They changed the order,” Calliopia stated. “They want you to change the warlock first.”
“Well, the warlock it is, then.” Jessup reached for Corvin, paused, then pushed through the resistance. Corvin tried to guide his hand into her grip, but his body resisted the joining of their hands just as much as Jessup’s. It was like trying to push together the north ends of two magnets. The two of them continued to push against the force, until their hands connected. There was a visible jolt, but Corvin tightened his grip on Jessup, refusing to let her go.
“Look at me,” he commanded, when her eyes rolled back and her body tried to pull away. He stared at her fiercely. “Look at me, Marta!”
Calliopia watched Jessup, smiling smugly. “You have to look at him.”
Jessup resisted, looking like she was walking into the wind. “How long?” she demanded through gritted teeth.
“Until he is fully visible.”
Jessup tightened her grip on Corvin and forced her eyes to him. The grip and the gaze were obviously both painful. Jessup moaned, trying to push through it. Her knuckles were white as she held on to Corvin’s hand.
Her eyes got wider, and Reg knew that Corvin was starting to become visible to her.
“Now?” she asked Calliopia breathlessly.
“Not yet.”
“I can’t…”
“You can,” Corvin and Calliopia both said at the same time.
Jessup’s head started to bow and her eyelids started to shut.
“You have to look at him. The whole time.”
Jessup blinked and forced herself to look at Corvin as he slowly appeared before her. It was several long minutes before her muscles started to slacken and her body slowly relaxed. She looked at Corvin, breathing heavily.
“Now?”
“Now you can let go,” Callie agreed.
Jessup did so, sighing.
“Thank you,” Corvin said politely.
“Why do you insist on running into rooms without checking for traps first?”
He ducked his head, acknowledging his guilt. “A shortcoming of mine.”
“I need someone who is going to follow orders instead of barreling straight into dangerous situations.” Jessup coughed and let her chin drop down, lowering her head and rubbing the back of her neck. “That was brutal.”
No one pointed out that they still needed to bring Reg back as well. As Corvin had anticipated, it was too demanding a task for Jessup to do twice without a break. Jessup cupped her hands over her eyes for a few minutes. Then she rubbed her eyes and looked at Corvin.
“Why did you switch places?”
“We decided that I was the one who could be of the most help to you under present circumstances.”
Jessup looked around her. “I suppose. So what is your advice? We can’t go far without wheels. For all I know, my car could be just on the other side of that hill, and I’m so turned around, I’d walk away from it.”
“No. We’re a good distance from where we started out. And I’m afraid that overground travel is going to be even more arduous than underground.”
“Other than the fact that we wouldn’t have to fight pixies on the way back.”
Corvin rolled one shoulder. “Don’t be so sure. There are bound to be plenty of sentries and tripwires overground that would tip them off to our presence.”
“I suppose.”
“I have contacts,” Corvin said, looking around. “A well-placed word or two should have us out of here. Then we can get Reg back…” His eyes searched for her shadowy shape. “You can get Calliopia back to her parents and we can take care of other incidentals.”
“Like payment,” Jessup said dryly.
“I don’t do this for my own entertainment. And obviously this time…” he looked down at his hand, which was red and inflamed. “There’s going to be a surcharge for danger to life and limb.”
“It’s your own fault. I just did what I had to to get you back.”
Reg sat watching them, wondering if they had already completely forgotten her. Starlight sniffed his way over and breathed on her foot, where he saw the beetle.
“Yes, it’s me,” Reg told him. “I’m still here. Being invisible. Or a beetle. Or a shadow. Depending on how cats see denizens of the shadow kingdom.”
Corvin’s eyes fell on Starlight. “Why did we even bring that blasted cat? A lot of good he’s done us!”
Starlight rose to his feet, hissing and puffing out his fur indignantly.
“He’s the reason that we got out of there in one piece,” Jessup argued.
“He’s the reason we’re here instead of at the car.”
“He’s helped. Even with the fighting. So leave him alone. We needed to find another way out of that rabbit’s warren, and he found it. Who else could have done that?”
It was a rhetorical question, so Corvin didn’t try to answer.
“Reg is… somewhat disabled this time, so no using birds as messengers. There isn’t anything you could send as a messenger, is there? No new ability that you’ve developed?”
Jessup’s lips pressed tightly together, signaling that she did not appreciate his jibe. “Look, Hunter. My talents are more… ordinary than yours. But that doesn’t make them any less s
erviceable. If we all had the same gifts, not only would it be a boring world, but the criminals would get away with everything. I’m a good investigator and I’m working this case. You should show me some respect.”
“You’re right,” he admitted. “And I know your lack of magical gifts is a sore spot, so I should be more of a gentleman. I’ve been… a little off my game.”
Jessup nodded. “Did something happen between you and Reg? I got the feeling she’s… a little more…” Jessup searched for the word, “…cautious than she was before?”
“Yeah, I screwed things up,” Corvin growled, “and I’m not going to say anything more about it than that.”
“Okay.” Jessup shrugged. “It’s too bad. She seems like someone who could really get you… as a friend.”
Corvin just shook his head and didn’t say anything.
“Now can we go home?” Calliopia asked, exasperated.
“Let’s get the show on the road,” Corvin agreed. He stood up and looked around. “The only viable solution I can think of is a private club I know of near here. They can provide us what we need to be out of here.”
“Nothing shady, Hunter. We want this to be all aboveboard.”
“What you want is for it to work. Without endangering your job or pitting us against the pixies again.”
Jessup didn’t argue. Reg suspected the “aboveboard” comment was just to cover her butt in case anybody ever asked what her instructions had been. Surely she didn’t actually expect Corvin to operate in the light. Reg had a feeling he didn’t usually solve his problems through official channels. That was why he was a consultant and not a policeman. If Corvin had been a cop, he probably would have brought the entire organization crashing down in a day.
“This way,” Corvin directed. “Let’s all stick together. I don’t want anyone saying or doing the wrong thing. Don’t look at anyone funny. Keep your eyes down and to yourself. There are some not-so-nice characters around here who wouldn’t think twice about slitting your throat.”
A Psychic with Catitude Page 17
