Motor City Witch (11 page)

“Aye, ’tis safe.” Toby sat on a pony beside the Huntsman, and Elise almost cried with relief.

“Thank you.” Ric immediately stood and stepped away from his tree, lowering his guns. He bowed as he spoke to the leader. After a moment, he turned back toward Elise. “It’s okay. These are the good guys.”

Greg and Jase stepped out, holstering their weapons, so Elise and Desmond followed.

“Mount up.” The antlered man’s voice was too deep to be human. Instantly, four of the empty horses sported silver-studded saddles.

As Elise crossed the bridge and stepped toward the hunt, one of the horses, a small, white mare, moved toward her and stood patiently while Elise mounted. She hadn’t ridden in years, but with these horses, she suspected that wouldn’t be a problem.

Jase, Des and Ric mounted as well, while George stripped and handed his clothing to Jase. “They don’t mind running with wolves, but they don’t like to carry us.” He shifted into wolf form and moved away from the horses.

Elise turned to Ric. “How did he know that?”

“We found out on the way here.” He gave the wolves a friendly smirk. “Greg tried and wound up on his ass in the dirt.”

Without any visible or audible commands, the horses began to move.

Faster and faster the scenery whizzed by, glinting in the moonlight, until it was all a silvery blur. Elise realized this speed was a powerful enchantment. In what seemed like only a couple minutes, they slowed to a halt between a massive Tudor-style house and an almost equally impressive thatch-roofed building with wide barn doors. Of course, the horses of the Wild Hunt would have a stable the size of a palace.

Desmond hopped down and reached up to give her a hand. “We haven’t given up yet,” he reminded her. “Aidan had tracking devices on him too.”

Elise nodded and followed the others into the house.

“When Toby’s horse brought him back here unconscious and you hadn’t returned, or contacted us,” an elf dressed in the queen’s livery said to Ric, “we convinced the Lord of the Hunt that you were in trouble.”

“Thanks, Sean.” Ric shook the other man’s hand. “That’s another one I owe you and your dad.”

“No worries.” Kieran was the older of the pair, though he didn’t look old enough to be Sean’s father. Elise shook her head as she tried to sort out who was who. This overlapping generations thing would take some getting used to. “We stopped keeping track before this one was born, remember?”

“I do.” Ric clasped hands with Kieran as well. “And now, if you don’t mind watching our backs a bit longer, we’ve got to head back to the palace.”

“One thing, before you go.” The Lord of the Hunt’s impossibly deep voice made Elise shiver. “Four horses returned while you were gone, but six were taken. Two are dead?”

“Yes.” Ric said. “We buried them with honor beneath the cairn at Bald Tor.”

The great rack of antlers dipped. “My thanks.”

Ric accepted the acknowledgement, then his face turned pensive. “Was there a guardsman—living or dead—on one of the mounts that returned?”

The Huntsman shook his head. “Just the brownie. The others were empty saddles, all three.”

Ric snorted. “So Eamon is either dead, lost or with the conspirators. Her Majesty is not going to be pleased.”

A rumbled bark that might have been laughter emerged from the Huntsman. “When is she ever?” With no further conversation, he turned and led the horses into the stable.

Ric led their group into the house, winding through dimly lit corridors filled with hunting scenes and trophies—
yuck
. There were no humanoids, she noticed gratefully. But—was that a dragon head mounted over the fireplace in the large room they passed?
Holy crap!
She didn’t want to think about the power required to kill a dragon, even if it was a fairly small one. It was also kind of sad. Dragons were sentient creatures, not necessarily evil and even Underhill, they were an endangered species. But the Wild Hunt would take anything that got in its way—or so the stories went, at least. Elise decided she really didn’t want to find out for sure.

Eventually they reached a sitting room with a portal in one corner. Ric gestured toward the portal. “Well, boys and girls, time to head back to the palace.”

***

Aidan looked around his cell one more time, studying it for weaknesses. He leaned his head against the back wall and listened. Yes, those were traffic noises. Whatever the hell building they were in, he now knew three things. This wall was not blocked for sound as the corridor was. Secondly, they were in the mortal realm—Underhill didn’t have semis or honking horns. And thirdly, this was an exterior wall, which meant that if Aidan could get through the damn thing, he could escape.

He tried pushing at the wall with magic.

Nothing. It was well warded. But, in the same way that physical objects could go through the cell bars, maybe he could get through the wall with sheer brute force, especially if he could create a weak spot.

Hmm. Maybe it depended on where the wards were in the wall. He focused on one single cinderblock, about waist high on the center of the back wall and ’ported it away from the wall, into the center of the room. It worked. Sure enough, all that remained in its space were two cold iron reinforcing bars, about six inches apart. Ouch. Well, he probably couldn’t squeeze through that, but Dina might be able to. Behind it was nothing but the brick exterior wall, the old mortar chipped away in places. Perfect.

Before he continued, he tore a page out of his passport and scribbled a note to Colin, instructing him to create a similar hole in his own cell. While his number one priority was getting Dina out, he couldn’t in good conscience leave another man’s child here either. The other prisoners were all adults. He’d come back for them once the children were safe. One by one, he removed enough blocks to create a hole he could crawl through.

He tried blinking away a brick from the exterior wall and found out for certain that the magical reinforcement was there, fused with the bricks themselves. So he couldn’t magick the bricks or the iron bars, but maybe…

He took off his undershirt, ripped it in half and wrapped his hands. Wedging his hands and feet between two of the bars, he shoved, boosting his strength with all the magic he could muster. The bars bent, but not enough. Then he felt a tiny hand on his shoulder and his strength spiked. The bars bent easily, creating a three-foot-diameter hole. Aidan pulled back and kissed Dina on the cheek. He’d take time to be amazed by the sheer magnitude of her power later. “Good girl. Now stand back.”

While his strength was still boosted, he kicked out the bricks behind his hole. Once they were clear, he and Dina scrambled out into the night.

He tucked Dina up against the wall and pulled his sweater over her head.

“Don’t move, sweeting.” Aidan stuck his head back into the cell and blinked a note to Colin, telling him to try to kick aside a single brick. Meanwhile, Aidan scrambled around this side of the building, looking for a tool.

Their prison was clearly an abandoned factory or mill of some sort—the brick building looked to date from the 1920s or even earlier. A river gleamed black and silver in the faint moonlight on three sides of them. An island? There were other buildings in the distance that didn’t look quite so abandoned. One or two even had a light burning inside. His elven senses detected a lot of pollution and environmental contamination, and there were huge mounds of some kind of metallic ore in the distance, along with train tracks and blacktopped roads. It was also…uncannily familiar. He found a garbage heap that held what he’d been hoping for—a shovel with a broken blade, but a sturdy wooden handle.

While his brain pieced together bits of sensory information, he returned to the side of the building and saw one brick pushed out an inch or so from the others. Good lad, Colin. Using his shovel, Aidan pried it the rest of the way out. A pale hand reached through the gap, clasped his and pressed a note into it.

In the light trickling from inside the cell, Aidan read,
Hurry up. Only have 2 hrs left.

“Shite.” He’d forgotten his watch was on Scottish time. Hurriedly, he started chipping bricks away with the shovel, while Colin shoved from the inside. Once the hole was big enough, he used the shovel handle, plus some extra magic from Dina, to bend the bars enough for the slender youth in baggy black pants and a hooded sweatshirt to slip outside. “Okay, let’s get out of here.” He picked Dina up and held her close against his chest.

“Colin, can you blink yourself some shoes?” The boy was three-quarters Fae, but that didn’t mean he had a pair of shoes in the mortal realm he could access.

“I’ll try.” A pair of black canvas sneakers appeared on his feet.

“Good.” Aidan blinked himself a light jacket from his home. Now that they were clear of their cells, his magic worked better, though it was still hampered slightly by all the iron nearby. He tried for his cell phone, but that attempt failed. Damn, Elise must still be Underhill—or at least the phone was. “It looks like we’re on an island—that bridge over there leads to a city. Can you run?” Aidan pointed to one of the automotive bridges, even though there was a railroad one closer. The car bridge seemed a safer bet.

“Yeah.” Colin stood to his full height of maybe five feet eleven inches and tilted his chin up to look Aidan in the eyes. “But what about the others? We can’t leave them in there.”

“I know.” Aidan looked the boy in the eyes. “But I’m not taking on goblins and who knows what else with a four-year-old present. Once I get you two clear, I’ll call for reinforcements and tear this place to the ground. That okay with you?”

Colin nodded and held out his hand to Dina. “Hey there. I’m Colin.”

“I’m Dina.” She lifted her chin as regally as a princess and shook his hand. “And this is Aidan, my daddy. Can we go home now? I want my mom.”

“Yeah.” Colin spoke as they began to jog toward the bridge on the other side of the factory. “Strangely enough, I do too, though you can never tell anyone I said that.”

They reached the bridge and Aidan took in the skyline before them. It couldn’t be—could it? It looked remarkably familiar. “We’re in bloody Detroit,” he whispered. “Why the hell…?”

“No idea, dude.” Despite Aidan’s longer stride, Colin was keeping up nicely and without wheezing. “The only intel I picked up was that somebody or something has plans for this city, and getting rid of the safehouse was part of the big picture.”

Damn, this was Zug Island—basically a slag heap at the junction of the Rouge and Detroit Rivers, covered in half-abandoned industrial sites, most of them former steel mills for the auto industry. No wonder it was scrambling his Fae senses—the place was a giant toxic waste dump filled with rusting iron.

“How did you hear this?” Crouching low, in case there were lookouts, they crept across the bridge.

“I’m a kid, they always underestimate the kid.” Colin shook his head in disgust.

When they made it to the end of the bridge, they both stood and scurried toward the nearest street corner. About two blocks away, Aidan spotted an all-night liquor and lottery market. Perfect.

“The goblin guards like to talk. When they brought me my food, I let them taunt me. Once they had all the prisoners in place, I think they were going to blow the building and take us all out at once.”

“But why?”

“One each from all the mixed families on the Council, dude. Your cousin was on the list to be snatched too.”

“But I’m not married or a halfling, so why me?” Aidan used a slight magical push to make sure a couple local thugs ignored them as they passed.

“Dude, even I heard the stories in the last couple months. Your cousin and your buddy, the bard, kicked Owain’s ass. You helped. That set you up as a target for his heir. This Oswald dude hates your guts. The kid surprised all of them though—they called her an ‘unexpected bonus.’ They’d been trying to figure out a way to get a hold of you.”

“You’re pretty smart, kid.” Aidan turned over the pieces of information in his mind. It was all starting to fit into place. “Okay, stay close behind me when we go inside, okay? And here.” He handed Dina over into Colin’s arms. “If I say run, run like hell. Please keep her safe until you find a way to call for help.”

“Got it,” Colin promised. He cradled Dina carefully and followed Aidan into the dingy little shop. Odors of spilled beer, tobacco and sweat fought for dominance as Aidan approached the attendant, who stood behind a pane of bullet-proof glass.

Aidan’s wallet was gone, so he blinked in some cash from his emergency stash at the house and held up the bill in front of the glass. “One crisp new Benjamin if you let me borrow a phone.”

Elise swallowed her impatience as she and Ric waited to see the queen. The rest of their group had gone back to Aidan’s apartment and some were even heading back to Grosse Pointe to check for word of Aidan and Dina, but she and Ric had to report to Her Majesty—and collect Meagan. Unfortunately, Queen Llyris was in the middle of a midnight supper and not receiving visitors. Just as Elise was trying to decide which of the two of them would go postal first, Meagan slipped out the door of the queen’s private dining room and grinned at the two guards, who bowed and let her pass into the corridor.

“I can’t believe that bitch won’t let you in.” She went up on her toes to kiss Ric, their lips tangling with passion and joy at seeing one another. “Thank God you’re okay. Did you find Dina? What about Aidan?”

As quickly as possible, they filled her in. Meagan’s grin faltered and was replaced by a scowl of sheer Irish-girl stubbornness. “Okay, I’m going to go back inside and see what I can do. Be right back, I promise. Don’t move.”

A few minutes later, she returned with one of the queen’s footmen and bared her teeth in a feral grin. “We’re to meet Her Majesty in her office.”

This proved to be a spacious suite, where the queen waited behind a broad gilded desk. Three unpadded white and gilt chairs sat across from her. After making their bows and curtseys, Elise, Ric and Meagan sat, under the watchful eyes of a pair of guards.

While Ric did the talking, Elise let her eyes roam the room. It was as ornately decorated as the rest of the palace, but there were a few touches that seemed more personal. Perhaps the queen actually did use this space for her day-to-day…work? Elise had never thought about how much effort a queen had to put in to the actual governing, though she knew Llyris was too much of a control freak to be a mere figurehead. Interesting.

Off to one side of the desk was a portrait of a girl. The style and simple white chiton suggested Roman or Greek origins and the girl was white-haired with the same high cheekbones and aquiline features as the queen. Could Llyris really be that old? Elise’s art curatorial knowledge put the piece at nearly two thousand years of age—which was within the possible lifespan for the Fae. Eventually, she noticed a detail that indicated the subject was someone other than the queen. Instead of glacial blue eyes, the girl in the portrait had a deep violet gaze that was stunning, but contained far more warmth than Elise imagined the queen was capable of expressing.

“I see you have an eye for art, Miss Sutton. You like my childhood portrait?”

Elise jumped in her seat as Llyris addressed her. “Y-yes, Your Majesty. It’s lovely.” Flattery, that was the ticket, Aidan had assured her.

“Yes.” The queen arched one perfect brow. “Isn’t it?” She turned back to Ric, ordering him to leave and get on with finding Aidan.

At that, the three of them stood, made their bows and filed out of the room. On the way back to Aidan’s apartment, Elise had a thought and turned to Ric. “Wasn’t Eamon one of the guards who put Fianna in a cell?”

“Yeah.” Ric paused. “Thinking we might want to check on her?”

Elise nodded. “Something’s fishy there and oddly enough, I don’t think it’s her. She came in on her own, remember? We might be better off to keep her close, see what she knows. At this point, any information could be valuable.”

“Yeah. And Oswald might want revenge on her since she survived and Owain didn’t. I think you’re right. She’s stuck here with no powers—let’s hope she isn’t already dead.”

Elise followed Ric and Meagan. She did hope Fianna was okay, but she hated wasting any time when they needed to be searching for Aidan. She couldn’t help remembering the blood that had filled her hand as she’d fallen through the portal.

When she saw the cell Fianna had been left in, though, she felt a wash of guilt at her urgency. The woman had come voluntarily. She shouldn’t have been shoved in a filthy hole like this. Meagan immediately blinked in some water and blinked off the handcuffs, while Ric questioned the guards.

Fianna just stood silent, filthy and bruised.

“Eamon,” Ric said grimly as they continued toward the main portal. “He waited until Wallis had left, then ducked back and changed the orders. He was planning to come back and get her himself, later.”

“Asshole.” Meagan didn’t mince words—Elise sometimes wished she could speak her mind as openly as her friend. “Fianna, are you okay?”

“I will be fine. Do not worry about me. Not while Lord Green Oak and the girl are still missing.”

They hurried down the corridor and through the portal to Grosse Pointe. Wallis had arrived before them, and his smile was starkly joyful as he greeted them. Behind him stood the two men she recognized as Lord Willow and his son, each with a woman by his side—mother and grandmother of the missing boy. Elise’s heart went out to them, until she realized they were grinning ear to ear as well.

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.”

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.”