Into the Woods: Tales From the Hollows and Beyond

  “Well?” the pixy snarled, and Trent quashed a sudden feeling of angst.

  “It’s not a ring we are stealing. It’s my child.”

  Jenks choked, dropping three inches before finding the wind beneath his wings. Embarrassed, Trent pushed the bike in motion, checking behind him before taking the low curb and entering into traffic. He could hear pixy wings, but he kept his eyes forward, an increasingly familiar feeling of repressed unease seeping into him as his legs took on the stress of a hill. He shifted the gears and stood up on the pedals, the bike swaying from side to side with his weight. He should have worked harder to keep Ellasbeth happy, but by God, the woman was bitter, vindictive, and so smart that she couldn’t get a joke.

  “Child?” Jenks said, flying backward two feet in front of him. “You mean like a baby?” He checked behind him and rose up as Trent went around a parked car. “You and Ellasbeth, right?” he asked as he dropped back down. “Eewww . . .”

  Trent kept pedaling, his breathing quickening. This had been a mistake.

  “He’d be what, five months?” Jenks asked from behind him, drafting. “The marriage Rachel broke up was to make an honest woman out of her? Damn!”

  “She’s three months,” Trent said, recalling the baby sites he’d been lurking on. She wouldn’t even be sitting up yet, just learning how push up on her palms and possibly reach for things. “The marriage was to solidify the East and West Coast clans divided by the Turn. Lucy is the physical show of that, and whoever raises her will chart the next thirty years until she can do it herself. Ellasbeth would keep us hiding, and to survive the resurgence of our numbers, we must have the strong feeling of community that coming out of the closet would give us.”

  The pixy whistled, and Trent sat down as the hill crested, easily coasting with traffic. Worry furrowed his brow. He’d been raised by nannies and paid caretakers. His mother and father had been loving but distant figures. He wanted to be more than that to his daughter.

  “Lucy?” Jenks said, not breathing hard at all as he caught up. “You named her Lucy? The elven golden child is named Lucy?”

  Trent squinted at the pixy, the wind pulling Jenks’s dust away almost as fast as it fell from his wings. “It’s a family name,” he said coolly. Ellasbeth’s family name. He would’ve named her something grander. Lucinda, Lucianna, or Lucile, perhaps. What am I going to do with a baby?

  Again the pixy laughed, and Trent made a quick right turn, Jenks’s chiming voice going faint as he missed it. “Oh. My. God!” Jenks said as he caught up, landing on the bar between the handles and folding his wings to avoid wind damage. “Rachel is going to crap her panties when she finds out you’re a daddy! Trent, you dog!”

  They were getting close to the waterfront, the traffic easing slightly in the largely tourist area. The bike hummed up through him, and he turned sharply to avoid a cobbled street. Jenks wasn’t laughing nearly as much as he thought he would. “You can understand why I didn’t tell her,” he muttered, and Jenks lost his mirth.

  “No, not really.” One hand holding his wings tight to his body, Jenks turned to look behind him at their forward progress. “Rachel makes enough mistakes in one week to fill a twenty-yard dump truck.”

  “Lucy wasn’t a mistake,” Trent said hotly.

  They were among the darker shade of large buildings, and Trent watched Jenks shiver. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, holding up a hand in protest. “You don’t give Rachel enough credit. She won’t think twice about it.” He hesitated, looking up at the towers. “Once it sinks in. You really have a kid? For realsies?”

  There was an unexpected relief at Jenks’s reaction, and it bothered him. What did he care what a pixy thought—even if that pixy had Rachel’s ear?

  Distracted, he adjusted the rearview mirror attached to the handlebars, and Jenks cleared his throat. “No one is following you,” he said, taking to the air as they paused at a stop sign for five eager tourists to cross. “Why do you think I’ve been sitting with my back to the wind?”

  “Thank you.” Trent pushed himself back into motion, and Jenks landed next to his ear. The streets were all downhill, and Trent was starting to see other cyclists with logos and colorful patterns on their tights. His pulse hammered, responding to his tension, not the road.

  “But you gotta tell me what the plan is,” Jenks prompted. “I get the black-jumpsuit-biker thing. It was a good idea. Beaning the next guy through the bathroom doorway wasn’t. What are you going to do? Pose as a delivery guy? I bet I could find a better way in.”

  Trent nodded to an unknown biker across the street in colorful racing spandex. He was at least five inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than Trent. “I’ve got a way,” he said cagily.

  “What the hell is it!” Jenks almost exploded, and Trent winced as his words seemed to go right through his head. “God, Trent, I’m trying to help you, and you act as if I’m looking to screw you over. How about a little trust!”

  He trusted people. He trusted quite a few, and quite a few had “screwed him over” as Jenks put it. The difference was that when people betrayed him, sometimes other people died. And then other people thought it was his fault. He was tired of it. Everything he had was at risk for the next four hours. Quen said he was not his father, but he was doing the same damning things. How can a child love a murderer? The Goddess help him, they had to come out of the closet if only so he could stop killing people.

  Frustrated, Trent pulled into a tiny alley. Jenks darted from his shoulder as the bike pivoted in a tight circle to face the opening. His eyes came up to find Jenks waiting, hands on his hips, a frown on his face . . . and hope in his eyes as he hovered. It was the last that did it, and Trent took a deep breath. It was almost harder to trust Rachel’s partners than it was to trust her.

  “Well?” Jenks prompted as three bikers whizzed by the mouth of the alley.

  Propping the bike against a wall, Trent removed the saddlebag, setting the box with his equipment aside before throwing the empty bag into a Dumpster. “There’s a bike race at Pike Place Market,” Trent said, and Jenks waved a hand in a tiny circle as if to say get on with it. “The course runs to within half a mile of the Withons’ front door, a quarter mile off from a secondary entrance that will be lightly guarded, if at all.”

  Wings humming, Jenks watched Trent tear open the box and stuff its contents in his belt pack. There wasn’t much: a short utility knife, two hundred yards of thin prototype cord with a fastener clip, harness, baby sling, collapsed float, tire repair kit, wad of explosive gum and fuse wire, a pen flashlight, lighter, and a handful of elven sleep charms. Earth magic wasn’t reliable this close to the ocean, but bringing the charms had seemed prudent even if it took several to work.

  “They’ll be watching the race,” Jenks said, hovering with his feet inches over the emptying box, and Trent nodded.

  “I expect the Withons will have a few men in it, as do I.” A flash of easily repressed anxiety passed through him as he looked at his wad of money, then the unexpected two-way radio. Grimacing, he threw the money away. Now it fit. “A quarter mile off the course there’s a secondary entrance to the Withons’ house—an escape tunnel used by monks. The Withon estate is a converted monastery on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean.”

  Jenks’s dust shifted from gold to red. “No shit!”

  Trent smiled, shocked at how much it lightened his mood. Maybe this was how Rachel survived being someone she didn’t want to be. “No shit. I think Mr. Withon has delusions of being the Count of Monte Cristo. They know about the tunnel, but it will likely have the lightest guard and is the best way in. It starts in a cliff and ends in the main kitchen.

  Jenks nodded in thought, his dragonfly-like wings dusting heavily. “That gets us in. How do we get out with a three-month-old? They make a lot of noise, you know. And you can’t stuff them in your coat and run, though that’s probably what Rachel would do.”

  Again smiling, Trent flicked a look past the mouth of the alley to a
rider skimming past, looking as sleek and athletic as one of his thoroughbreds, one hand on the handlebars and halfway turned to look behind him. “I need a west-facing window,” he said. A west-facing window within a narrow parameter of time, but no need to tell Jenks that. Either he would make it, or he wouldn’t.

  Snorting, Jenks landed on the handlebars, turning sideways to look at himself in the tiny rearview mirror and shift his sword. “I didn’t know elves had wings. You gonna fly out?”

  Silent, Trent tossed the empty box into the trash and got on the bike. “I’m more worried about finding the nursery without . . . alerting anyone,” he said, catching himself before voicing his real fear. He wasn’t afraid to kill—he was afraid that it was becoming too easy. “They know I’m coming. There will be guards.” Frowning, he pushed the bike into motion, and he rolled smoothly back into the street. What if they had a decoy?

  “I can help with the guards.”

  Jenks was flying beside him, easily keeping up as they followed a pair of riders to the start of the bike race. When Trent said nothing, the pixy’s dust shifted to a mustard yellow. “I can!” he said belligerently. “I can kill people your size if they aren’t using magic. I could kill you, with half a day to plan it.”

  “Okay.”

  It might not have been the right thing to say, but Trent didn’t care if he insulted him. He’d only accepted his help to shut him up and maybe get Rachel to trust him a little. But instead of bristling in anger, the pixy snorted, his dust a bright silver stream behind him. “Your disbelief amuses me,” Jenks said dryly. “But if you keep ignoring me, I’m going to stab you in your ear. Nothing permanent, but you’ll lose some hearing from the scar tissue.”

  Pulse fast from his exertions, Trent chuckled, only to find Jenks laughing with him. This might not be so bad if the pixy understood his dry sense of humor. “I have a boat to pick us up, but it has a narrow window,” he said, leaning as he took a wide curve.

  Jenks’s wings shifted pitch as he kept up. “You’re going down on that fish line you stuffed in your pack?” he said, his disbelief obvious. Trent could understand why. It didn’t look like it could support a cat, much less him and a . . . baby. The Goddess help him, what was he going to do with a baby? He hadn’t planned on raising a child this soon, and certainly not alone, but now that he had one, he wanted to do it right.

  The way suddenly opened up into a wide courtyard of people, bullhorns, colored banners, and flags. Damping an unexpected surge of alarm, Trent slowed. “Well?” he said as they cruised into the starting area. “Is there anything you can add to my plan?”

  Jenks landed on his shoulder, surprising him. “Trent, I’ve decided I’m going to help you get your kid,” he said, and Trent blinked, the bike continuing forward on momentum. “Not just so you can help Rachel, but for you. Getting your kid back is important.”

  “Thank you,” he whispered, wondering what it meant to have the unconditional support of a pixy.

  “I’ll let you know if something strikes me,” Jenks said casually. Trent stifled a shiver when the pixy’s fitfully moving wings tickled the side of his neck. “Stealing babies,” the pixy said with a laugh. “I can’t wait to tell Rachel.”

  Rachel. What was she going to say when he walked in with a baby? he wondered as he found a curb and brought the bike to a rest among the milling throng of bikes. Laugh at him? Tell him he should have kept his weasel in its cage? True, Lucy hadn’t been expected, but now that she existed, he wanted to be a part of her life, not just because of who she was going to become, but because of a nameless feeling pulling him across the city.

  He had a daughter, and his daughter needed him.

  TWO

  Trent breathed in and out in time with his pedaling, the ache in his chest beginning to hurt more than his legs as he held his head down and drafted off the bike ahead of him. My God, would the Weres ever shut up? he thought, tilting his head to watch the pack of three men and one woman, clearly a team from a local radio station by the looks of their colorful spandex and logo-plastered water bottles. They were more than a third of the way into the race, and they hadn’t stopped talking the entire way as they pushed through the peloton and left most of the riders behind, their natural endurance putting them ahead of all but the most conditioned humans.

  He had joined them early because anyone talking so much couldn’t be planning an attack, and he’d stuck with them because they were going faster than most everyone else. Now, after an hour of their chatter of killer hills, salt blocks, carbing up, and butt butter, he was wishing he’d found someone else.

  The road before him snaked around a wide turn as it began another slow rise up, and after a quick glance at his handlebar-mounted GPS, he wondered if he should start dropping back to put distance between him and the radio team before he slipped off the marked route and into the national forest they were biking through.

  He glanced behind him; there was no one visible between him and the last curve, almost a half mile back. Head lifting, he began to slow, watching the last biker pull away, talking, still talking. Weres were undoubtedly the chattiest of all Inderlanders, their mouths going nonstop whenever they did anything even remotely physical. One of his best horse whisperers had been a Were, and the woman had never shut up, not even in bed.

  Slowly the Weres pulled ahead as the sun-dappled road wound along the top of a ridge overlooking the sound. To the left, the land fell away quickly to the surf. To the right, scrubby trees and brush of the forest made a slow incline up. The five-foot-wide path was paved, clearly made for bike travel, and his thin street tires hummed under him. He’d been cruising at a good speed, but after an hour, the pace was starting to tell. Save some energy for later, he mused, backing off even more. What waited for him at the Withon compound was not encouraging.

  The sound of Jenks’s wings cut through his worrisome musings, and the pixy landed on the GPS, his dust making the liquid crystal screen blank out. “There are two guys back there being very careful to stay just behind every curve,” he said, his wings flat to his back as the wind pulled at them. “They smell like elves and have that same straw-yellow hair as Ellasbeth. If you drop from the pack now, they’re going to catch you alone. They’ve been taking out everyone who catches up with them. The guy in the blue is popping their tires.”

  Frowning, Trent tucked his chin to lessen the wind. Magic users. No surprise there. “How long until we reach the turnoff?” he asked, looking up to see that the team of Weres wasn’t as far ahead of him as he had thought they’d be.

  Jenks looked down at the GPS, head cocked when he realized his dust blanked the screen. “Ah, about a half mile. The turnoff is at the bottom of the next hill. It runs through a patch of thistles, so watch it.”

  The thistles hadn’t been on his intel, and grateful, he silently thanked Rachel for insisting he include Jenks. He had thought it had been unusual that no one had caught up to them—Ellasbeth’s men conveniently eliminating witnesses. His agreement with the Withon family concerning the theft of Lucy was not necessarily legal, but it was binding.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, knowing Jenks heard him when his dust shifted color. “I’d rather take them out in the woods than on the road.” Standing up on his pedals, Trent started to power up the hill, his legs protesting until they rallied to the demand. Jenks darted off, and the GPS/MPH indicator gave a hiccup and returned to life. Swinging to the left, Trent began overtaking the complaining Weres. They’d likely shave minutes off their time if they’d quit talking.

  “You want me to take them out before you get to the turnoff?” Jenks asked, his dust streaming out behind him as he easily kept up, and Trent eyed him.

  “Can you?” he said, starting to breathe hard.

  Jenks shrugged, and the Were they were currently passing almost fell off his bike, staring at the pixy. “Not if they’re magic users, but I can slow them down to give you a few more seconds to get on the turnoff.”

  Trent nodded, not speaking as
they passed another Were. “Don’t endanger yourself more than what’s prudent,” he wheezed. One more Were to go, and then he’d be free of them.

  A burst of gold dust sifted from the pixy, lost in the cool breeze rising up from the ocean. “Check!” he said cheerfully. He hesitated a moment as if he was going to say something more, then shifted direction and was gone.

  Still standing on the pedals, Trent forced himself up the hill, his legs protesting and his chest on fire. The last Were fell behind him when she halted at the top of the hill, stopping to look back down the hill and shout encouraging words to her teammates. Ellasbeth’s house/castle/monastery was visible in the ocean mist ahead of him as he rounded the curve and started down. It looked cold even from this distance, the edifice jutting out past the trees and bracken. There was ocean between him and it, the road falling down and to the right before it rose and swung high again to pass within a stone’s throw of the front gate. It was here, though, where he’d break from the race.

  The wind buffeted him as he took the curving road into the shade, his hammering pulse easing. Ellasbeth’s home held his attention. It still looked like a monastery, one that had not sheltered happy monks growing vegetables and glorying God, but rather those bitterly hiding from the world. It was forbidding, so close to the sea that earth magic would not be a sure thing, and so near a fault line that ley line magic would be difficult unless having grown up among the fractured feel of the lines here. He couldn’t help but think he was rescuing his daughter, imprisoned in a castle, shut off from the world but for what her caretakers thought was appropriate.

  The hum of the tires buzzed up into him, and in an instant, the heat of the sun vanished as he cruised under the shade of the trees, eclipsing his view of the monastery. At the bottom was a patch of thistle. A walking path bisected it, the left-hand way going down the cliff to the rocky beach, the right rising up into the primeval forest. Trent glanced at his GPS. This had to be it.