She's No Faerie Princess (32 page)

Squick made a big production of griping and grumblingover being forced to spend his time looking for a peskypixie until Walker threatened to strangle him with his owntail. So in the end he shut up and just glared at the worldfrom inside the canvas bag Walker had given Fiona tocarry him in. Someone might notice if she walked downthe street with an imp sitting on her shoulder, Walker hadpointed out.

"Gate first," Fiona said as they stepped out onto the

pavement and Walker turned to lock his door. "If we're going to retrace Babbage's steps, we might as well start where he started."

"Be faster to starts where he finished," the bag grumbled.

Fiona ignored him. Her mind had enough problems tofocus on already without worrying about the surly imp. Walker's theory about the identity of the person in controlof the demons had thrown a huge wrench in their plans toidentify him. At least when they'd believed him to be asummoner, the pool of possible candidates had beenlimited to that somewhat sparse population. The idea thatthe culprit could now be any one of the millions ofresidents of Manhattan didn't bode well for their chancesof finding him. Especially not before anyone else got hurt.

It had been pretty much all bad news since she'd wokenup, Fiona admitted, biting back a sigh. She'd been havinga really good dream, too. Something about her and Walker and complete privacy in a lushly furnished roomwith sturdy locks and an even sturdier bed frame. Insteadof putting all that lovely carpentry to the test, she'd beenjerked out of sleep and faced with an infinitely lessattractive reality.

She could practically feel the trouble brewing. Somethingwas about to go wrong, if it hadn't already. She couldn'tput her finger on it, but she could feel it, like an itch alongher skin that refused to go away no matter how much shescratched at it.

The fact that Babbage still wasn't answering her callmade her nervous. Usually, she had trouble getting Babbage to go away. He tended to stick like gluewhenever she gave him the slightest encouragement and

often when she didn't. The only explanations she could

think of for his silence did not reassure her.

They entered the park on the Upper West Side, off Indian Road, avoiding the tennis courts to the south and theplaygrounds that dotted the edges of the parksdepartment land. Even so, they were hardly the only onesaround. In the fading light of early evening, joggers andskaters and cyclists shared the paths with strollers andsightseers. Fiona even spotted a small group of humansin hiking gear, outfitted with binoculars and field guidesfor identifying the birds and plants that filled the park.

She supposed that she and Walker didn't look all thatdifferent from any of the other couples who walkedtogether along the paths that curled through the hillsides. Blending in was helpful, but they weren't here to take inthe closest thing to fresh air that Manhattan had to offer. They took the nearest path west, heading deeper into thepark where the trees thickened into surprisingly densecopses of old-growth forest.

Inwood, she had read, represented the last remnants ofthe woodland that had covered Manhattan when thehumans had settled it only four centuries ago. Only a littlelonger than she'd been alive, and already they'd coveredall but the smallest slivers of the island with concrete andmetal and glass. She shook her head. No wonder magichad gotten so hard to come by. Faerie magic especially,since it relied so heavily on the energy of the land.

Inwood Hill Park was the last piece of real land in the cityand one of the only places with enough wild magic left tosustain a Faerie gate.

Walker glanced down at her and raised an eyebrow.

"That's a weird expression," he said. "I can't tell if you're

angry or amused. What's going on in your head?"

"Just reflecting on how fast this place managed to go to pot once we left. Apparently, you give mortals a few centuries and they just can't help but muck the whole place up."

They reached a branch in the path that gave them thechoice of turning north or south. Instead, they stepped offthe trail and began to wend their way into the woods.

"A few centuries? Hey, you guys moved out something like three
 
millennia
 
ago. Now you're going to complain about the new decorating scheme? That's just bad manners."

Fiona chuckled and ducked to avoid a low-hangingbranch. "Yeah, yeah. Better bad manners than bad taste,is what I say."

"Dilettante."

"Barbarian."

They grinned at each other and kept walking.

As the trees grew taller and thicker around them, the lastof the weak sunlight faded, leaving them in a prematuredarkness more charcoal than black.

"Can you see okay?" Walker asked.

"Sure. My night vision isn't as good as yours, but I get

by."

The woods muffled the noise, too. There wasn'tanywhere in the city where you could completely escape

the sounds of traffic and people, but they were quieter here. The Henry Hudson Parkway ran overhead to the west, but no one else had wandered off the path with them, so Fiona didn't hear any voices or any footsteps other than their own.

Until Squick piped up, of course.

"I's suffocating! Air! I needs air!"

Fiona rolled her eyes and shrugged off one strap of theshoulder bag, letting it fall open to the cool evening. "You're not suffocating, but there's no one else around,so I suppose you can come out now."

The imp clambered up the canvas and used Fiona'sshirtsleeve like a ladder to haul himself up to hershoulder. With much grumbling and an indignant "humph," he prepared to settle himself down into hisaccustomed seat.

Walker glanced over and shook his head. "Not there,squirt. Try the other side."

The imp obeyed and scrambled across Fiona's shouldersto sit on the other side. Fiona looked from her shoulder to Walker with wide eyes, puzzled by the order. As soon astheir eyes met, she felt the skin of the shoulder closest tohim tingle and realization dawned. Squick had beenabout to sit on the shoulder that bore Walker's mark. Shesaw the satisfaction in her mate's expression when shemade the connection, but he didn't say anything. Shesupposed he didn't need to.

Walker led the way up a hill and paused as they reachedthe top. "We're getting close to the gate now, so I want

you to keep your eyes open. I know we didn't see anything last time we were here, but it was daylight then. It's nearly dark enough now for demon activity, so stay alert, all right?"

Fiona nodded, but she wasn't worried about demons; shewas worried about Babbage.

"Miss Fiona," Squick said suddenly, his high, childlike voice speaking right up next to her ear, "did you knows your pocket is glowing?"

Automatically Fiona looked down and saw a dim blue-silver light glowing through the fabric of her jacket pocket. It took a moment for her to remember exactly what shehad put in that pocket. The little pouch of glass.

She grabbed Walker's arm and stopped in her tracks.

"Look."

Digging in her pocket, she drew the pouch out and held itup to him. Even through the velvet, the light shining fromthe small shards was unmistakable. Excitement welledinside her.

"He's here," she said quietly but animatedly. "He's in the

park. He must be near the gate. Come on! Hurry!"

She didn't wait for Walker's answer, just took off into thewoods. Behind her, the Lupine cursed, but she heard hislong strides hurrying after her. He'd be angry with herwhen they reached the gate, she knew. He'd probablygive her a lecture on how he was supposed to beprotecting her and he couldn't do that if she was going totake off without warning him. She didn't care. He couldlecture all he wanted after they found Babbage. Her relief

at knowing he was close made her feet lighter. Finally, she was going to get some good news after way too much of the other kind.

Breaking through the tree line into the clearing, Fionascanned the open area for signs of the pixie. She didn'tsee him. Frowning, she realized she couldn't hear hiswings beating, either.

"Oh, Miss Fiona," Squick said, but he didn't sound quite like himself. His arrogant, petulant tone had disappeared, and in its place he sounded… sad. "Oh, Princess, this is baddie-bad-bad-bad."

The imp jumped down from her shoulder and ran acrossthe leaf-covered clearing to a dark patch on the ground atthe foot of the Faerie door.

She felt Walker's hand settle on her shoulder at the sametime that her eyes focused on the rough stone of thegate. She had to blink before what they were seeingmade sense. The dark, faintly glistening smears on theface of the rock hadn't been there the last time she'dseen it, and neither had the series of ugly, uneven markson the trees at either side.

In her hand, the pouch of glass glowed brightly, giving offenough light to cast the shadow of her hand on theground at her feet. It glowed so brightly that Babbageshould have been hovering right there in front of her.

The hand on her shoulder tightened and then Walker waspulling her toward him, wrapping her up in his arms andpressing her head to his chest, blotting out the sight ofthe gate. Numbly Fiona blinked against the soft cotton ofhis shirt, but the images wouldn't go away. Even with her

eyes closed, she could still see the dark, gory mess of

demon signs written in her friend's cooling blood.

Walker's gut clenched, and he suppressed the urge tohowl up into the twilight sky. He didn't need to knowmagic to know why his mate stood silent and shaking inhis arms. His nose told him that. He could smell theblood, thick and sweet and metallic on the night air. Theyhad found Babbage, but the pixie wouldn't be sharing hisnews with them.

Walker held Fiona tight against him, thinking savagelythat he'd spent too much time lately comforting thewomen he loved. When he found the thing responsiblefor causing their pain, he was going to relish tearing it intotiny, bloody, squirming little pieces.

At the foot of the gate, Squick was bending over what Walker had thought was a pile of bloody leaves, but whenthe imp put one hand on the lump, he realized they reallyhad found the pixie. Walker's sensitive night vision hadn'tregistered the small body because it had already gonecold. Babbage had been dead at least a few hours.

"I didn't means it when I called him stupid," Squick said, looking up at them. His puckish face was drawn into lines of confusion, like a child who couldn't understand why Fluffy didn't just wake up from its nap. "He not so stupid all the times."

Walker felt Fiona shudder, heard her uneven gasps asshe fought back the tears that threatened to choke her. She stirred in his embrace, and he had to force himself torelease her when all his instincts demanded that he

protect her from the painful sight at her back.

"I know, Squick," she said. Walker felt a surge of pride. Her voice was thick with tears but steady and strong. His mate wouldn't fall apart now. She knew this wasn't the time. "Babbage didn't think you were stupid all the time, either."

It sounded strange to Walker, but it seemed to comfort Squick. The imp nodded and looked down at the pixie'sremains. "I don't thinks he still want to be here, Miss Fiona. I think he probably rathers to be home. Maybe Ican takes him home?"

Fiona shook her head. "I'm sorry, Squick, but the gateisn't working, remember? We can't get back home."

"Oh yeah." The imp seemed to deflate. "I forgots."

Walker looked around the clearing, paying carefulattention to the area just in front of the gate. He could seea few tracks that obviously hadn't been left by the pixie,who seemed a lot more inclined to fly than to walk.

Walker frowned. "I think Babbage did, too. Judging by thetracks, it looks like he was killed by the same demon thatattacked us when Fiona first came through the gate,which means Babbage had plenty of time to see himcoming. Probably heard him, too."

Fiona frowned. "So?"

"So, all the entrances to Faerie are warded against

demons, right?"

She nodded. "Yes. There hasn't been a demon sighted inour territory since the Wars."

"Then I think Babbage's first reaction was to head right for the gate. He forgot that it was sealed. He was trying to get back into Faerie."

"But Miss Fiona telled him to comes back to her," Squick protested, "and the pixie always do just what Miss Fiona say."

"Maybe he did," Walker said. "But if a demon was coming after him, he might have thought he could go through the gate and wait on the other side until the demon got sick of waiting and left. Then he could come back and talk to Fiona just like he promised."

"He might have," Fiona said softly. "Babbage always obeys orders, but he's never been called courageous. If he'd seen the demon coming, he would have tried to get to safety."

Walker put his hand on her shoulder again. The urge tocomfort her was too strong to ignore. Even if he couldn'tmake the pain of losing a friend go away, Walkerremembered how much it had meant that she'd beenthere when he'd found out about Shelby.

The bond between them kept getting stronger andstronger, and if they had ever needed to share theirstrength with each other, now was the time.

He felt the coolness of her skin even through the coveringof her shirt and jacket, but it began to warm at his touchand he felt her pull herself up. She squared her shouldersand drew a deep breath, then turned to look up at thegate.