Winged Warriors

  "I just talked to Ben. He's living in this tapestry as a golden dragon." I pointed behind me. "I know it sounds crazy, but I'm not just hearing random voices coming from my head. Ben has…ascended." It felt like the best description of what had happened to him. He had definitely gotten smarter.

  Several Council members looked at each other and nodded. They seemed very impressed. I took that to mean I'd gotten that part right, at least.

  "I guess he gave the ultimate sacrifice and did it for all the right reasons, so he got a promotion or something. Anyway, he says that I don't need to worry about the details of the plan to defeat the Forsaken, so I'm going to leave that up to you guys. I have other things I need to do to help get ready for this big event or whatever." I said that with what sounded like full confidence, knowing all the while that I had no clue what I was actually going to do. I just felt this immediate need to talk to my friends.

  "I have to go talk to some fae who aren't in this room, which I can go do while you guys put together some ideas and plans of action. We can meet again after I've had about twenty-four hours of sleep and at least three meals." I paused, not sure whether I should tell them my next bit of news, but deciding quickly that it was probably relevant since they were the plan-makers. "And by the way, I don't know how this is going to figure into the whole thing, but I'm pregnant with twins. So, yeah. I'll talk to you feeps later."

  I signaled for Tim to follow me and walked out the door, ignoring the chorus of surprised and freaked-out voices that rose behind me. The old Jayne would have worried what they were thinking and would have become angry about them calling out for me and telling me to get back there immediately, but the new Jayne didn't have time to worry about the little stuff like making sure fae liked me, treated me the way I wanted to be treated, and approved of what I was doing. I had a big-picture situation to deal with for sure, and the Council members were going to be key to fixing the horrible situation facing us, yes.

  But before I could move forward with any plan, I needed to be able to see what that big picture was. My friends would help me put it together, and the most important ones, Tony and Spike, had to be there for that process. I was going to eat, sleep, and then somehow find my way into the Gray so I could get those dudes out of there and back with me where they belonged.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "SO, WHAT'S THE plan?" Tim asked. He was flying next to me as I strode down the hallway toward the dining room.

  "I have to get something to eat. Then I need to sleep for just a little bit, and then I'll find Brad and get started on rescuing Tony and Spike."

  "You know Brad already tried that, and it didn't work out so well."

  "Yes, I know, but I can't let that stop me. I'm not leaving them in there, and we're running out of time." I could feel it in my bones. Maybe it was just my imagination, but ever since I talked to the Ben-dragon, I could feel this weird vibration in the air. I'd halfway convinced myself it was the Forsaken announcing their arrival. Let's just say it wasn't a good vibe.

  "Okay, I'm on board," Tim said. "But I'm going to need to talk to Abby about it before we take off."

  "You're not coming."

  "What do you mean, I'm not coming? Of course I'm coming. I thought we were already clear on this: where you go I go. We're a team, like Bonnie and Clyde…Superman and Wonder Woman…Batman and Robin."

  "First of all, Bonnie and Clyde were serial killers. And I don't think Superman and Wonder Woman ever hooked up as a team. And by the way, which one are you? Batman or Robin?"

  "I can't believe you have to ask that. I look terrible in red, you know that. Red is for fire sprites and cube-eyes. Ugh."

  "Of course you're Batman." I rolled my eyes. Having Tim with me could either be a blessing or a curse, so I wasn't convinced it was a good idea for him to participate in this particular rescue. "We'll see when the time comes. I don't want you going in there and getting recruited over to Team Void like you almost did last time."

  "I don't have any idea what you're talking about." He sniffed and looked away when I tried to give him the eye.

  "Oh, really? You don't remember talking to a troll and agreeing to help him jump me and take me out?"

  "That did not happen."

  "Okay, so you don't remember getting shoved down into my bra either, I suppose?"

  "Now that I remember. That I will never forget. I'm still scarred. Scarred for life." He had the nerve to shudder.

  "My boobs aren't that bad."

  "Girl, your boobs are sweaty, and that's not all, either."

  We were almost to our destination, the dining room less than a minute away. "Whatever. Let's talk to Brad and find out what he knows. But before we do that, I need to make sure I have a clear head. I'm exhausted and I'm starving."

  "That's the pregnancy talking. Those little suckers are going to drain your energy like you wouldn't believe."

  My hand went to my belly involuntarily. I rubbed it a little, wondering what was going on in there. "Maybe I should go see a doctor."

  "It probably wouldn't be a bad idea. Prenatal care is very important."

  I snorted. "What do you know about prenatal care?"

  "Are you kidding me? I have a son, or have you forgotten?"

  "Yeah, but you weren't around for the pregnancy or the birth."

  "Hey! Don't sass me. That's not the point. The point is that I know what I'm talking about, and you should go see a doctor because I said so." He sounded so much like a father it was ridiculous, but I didn't hate that he was playing that role. He did a much better job at it than my real one ever did.

  "I will, I promise. Food and sleep first, though." We arrived at the dining room, and I pushed open the door. I had expected us to be alone in there because it wasn't time for a meal to be served yet, but there was a table full of changelings, and although there were several I'd never met before, there were a few I recognized. I went right over to them, and Becky was the first to jump up.

  "Jayne! Oh my god! I'm so happy to see you."

  I put my arms around her waist as she threw hers over my shoulders and squeezed me tight. She had to stand on tiptoe to reach me. I hadn't noticed when I'd embraced her earlier how thin she'd become.

  "Have you lost weight?" I frowned at her as she pulled away. She definitely looked thinner. She was practically skin and bones.

  "Yeah, a little. It was a big adjustment coming back. You know how it is." She waved me off, but I looked at Finn and he was slowly shaking his head. He looked worried. I knew from Becky's silly excuse that she wasn't going to say anything there in front of any of those other fae, so I let it go temporarily. Later, when we were alone, I'd get more information.

  "Finn, how are you doing?"

  He stood and bowed at the waist with his fist on his chest. "Fine and dandy, Mother. How 'bout you? How're you holdin' up?"

  "I'd be a whole lot better if you'd stop that bowing stuff and get to the hugging part."

  He grinned big and pulled me into an embrace. He smelled like the forest and sweat—in other words, perfectly Finn. It was ever so comforting.

  "You do give the best hugs," he said over my shoulder.

  "Hey! I thought I gave the best hugs," Becky said, pouting.

  "You do, babe. You give the best romantic hugs. She gives the best Mother hugs."

  Becky smiled. "That's better."

  Finn and I pulled apart, and I waved at Scrum as he stood up from his chair. "Hey, man. How's it going? Don't get up. Sit, sit." I motioned for him to take his seat. I hated that they were all being so formal with me.

  He slowly lowered himself into his chair. "I'm good. Glad to see you in here. You must be starving."

  "I am." I rubbed my growling stomach.

  I saw Becky and Finn exchange meaningful glances at my gesture. Becky got a total goobery grin on her face. I looked at Tim who had alighted on the table and was deliberately looking everywhere but at me. "Don't tell me…let me guess; Mr. Big Mouth has been sharing my news."

&n
bsp; Becky half grinned, half grimaced at me. "I'm sorry. He was worried about you. How are you feeling?" She rubbed my shoulder but stared at my belly. "Everything okay? Are you nauseous? Have you barfed at all?"

  "What is she talking about?" Scrum asked, looking around at everyone's faces.

  Becky was about to open her mouth to answer when the door flew open and Sam came barging in. She looked around the room until her gaze landed on me and then she headed right over.

  "Oh, Lord have mercy. Looks like we got an unhappy witch on our hands," Finn said. His hand strayed to the bow that was leaning against his chair.

  I raised my hand at her. "Hey, Sam. What's up?"

  She stopped in front of me, bits of her hair not held back in a messy ponytail floating around her face. It didn't stop her from being the prettiest girl in the room. "I've been looking everywhere for you."

  "Well, you found me. And I'm about to grab something to eat. Want to join me?" I started walking toward the buffet and she followed me. We grabbed two plates and made our way down the line. I piled anything that looked good on top of mine, avoiding the wiggly meats, of course.

  Sam put food on her plate indiscriminately. There were definitely moving meats involved. "There's a bunch of witches who want to talk to you," she said.

  "I can imagine. But right now I've got to eat, sleep, and then I need to go get Tony and Spike before I talk to anyone else."

  She paused, holding a spoonful of three-bean salad over her plate. "You sure that's a good idea?"

  "I can't believe you just asked me that question." I paused at the end of the buffet line and looked at her. "You actually think I would abandon my friends in the Gray? Just leave them there to get more lost with every minute that goes by?"

  "No. I'm just thinking that you may have other more important things to do first."

  I rested my weight on my left leg and cocked a hip. "Like what?" Here was someone else who thought she should be the one telling me what to do. The line of fae who wanted the position of Jayne's Boss stretched about a mile long, or so it seemed.

  She shrugged like what she was about to say was no big deal. "I thought maybe you'd want to deal with your little dragon friend first."

  My eyebrows drew together in confusion. "My little dragon friend?" I was thinking of Ben floating in the tapestry. He'd seemed perfectly fine to me. Better than fine, in fact. He was finally chilled out and zen, no longer consumed by the idea of ruling the world. I wished I could be as cool as he was now.

  "Yeah. The wyvern. She's a little bit wild and difficult to control."

  She was talking about Long, which made way more sense. "Control?" I sure hoped that didn't mean what I thought it meant.

  "Yeah. Control. Kinda something you have to do when you have a pissed off dragon on the loose."

  I could just see my poor little Asian friend locked up in cuffs and chains, screaming her head off in the basement prisons where they'd kept the buggane. No wonder she was pissed. "Awesome. You guys have fucked something up haven't you?"

  "You guys? I hope you're not talking about me. I'm just the witch trying to keep things contained."

  I hoped that meant there were no chains involved if they'd called Sam in to handle things. "And by 'contained' I guess that means you've thrown a spell on her or something?"

  Sam definitely looked offended. "Hey…I do what I do, and you do what you do. And I haven't seen your shit work out perfectly every time, so I don't know who you think you are to come down on me."

  She had me on that one. "Okay, fine. You used a spell and it may or may not have worked out perfectly. I'm cool with that, so long as there were no chains or cuffs involved. Just take me to her."

  Sam glanced down at my plate. "What about your breakfast?"

  I had to laugh at that. "Is it breakfast? Or is it lunch? Or maybe it's dinner?" I looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember what time and day it was. I had absolutely no clue. As far as I knew, Christmas could be right around the corner…and I hadn't done any shopping yet.

  "Nothing's going to happen in the next hour. Eat and rest up for a little bit, and then we'll go over."

  I chewed my bottom lip as I thought of my options. There was a wyvern on the loose or at least trying to get loose so she could mess someone up, and that definitely wasn't optimal. Long had been good to me, and she had suffered enough already; I couldn't just leave her hanging out in another prison. And seeing her would also satisfy my curiosity as to what had happened to her after we'd been separated, assuming she could and would communicate with me. I looked up at Sam, realizing that I'd forgotten another one of my fellow inmates. "What about Mike?"

  "Mike?" She frowned at me.

  "The big dude who was with her."

  "Oh. That guy. He's fine. He's hanging out with the ogres."

  I nodded. That made total sense. "You haven't had to throw a spell on his ass?"

  "No. He's kinda chill—one of those fae who just does what he's told."

  "Good. At least there's someone I don't have to worry about."

  "Wellll…I wouldn't say that." Sam actually smiled.

  It was like finding a brilliant diamond buried in a plain rock to see her teeth exposed in happiness like that. Treasure! I couldn't help but grin back. "Do I want to know?"

  "Probably not," she said. "But I'm going to tell you anyway."

  I rolled my eyes. "Of course you are." I picked up my plate and brought it back to the table, sitting down where Becky had made a spot for me. Sam took the chair to my left and Tim floated down to start attacking a strawberry I had taken from the buffet for him.

  "Jayne doesn't know about what that ogre Mike did," Sam said, glancing at Becky.

  That's all Becky needed to prompt her into story-telling mode. "Oh my good-ness, Jayne. You would not believe what happened."

  "Tell me," I said, shoveling food into my mouth so fast I didn't taste any of it. I just wanted to end the gnawing hunger tearing my stomach apart.

  "Oh my god, so, okay…he shows up, right? He gets his amulet, and he's just sitting there like a big lump, and everybody's like, well, maybe he's a changeling or maybe he's not…and then all of a sudden, he stands up and he starts roaring like a crazed beast, and everyone's, like, trying to get away from him, and all the furniture got turned over and broken, and everybody was running around the room, and Dardennes was trying to get the bracelet off his wrist, and he like totally accidentally slugged Céline."

  My eyes almost fell out of my head. "What? Dardennes hit Céline?

  "No, not Dardennes, silly. Mike did. The ogre hit her."

  "He knocked her out?"

  "Well, yeah, but he didn't mean to. I was there, and I totally saw every second of it. He was just throwing his arms all around, and she got in the way. She basically walked right into his fist."

  "Shit. That must've hurt."

  "Yeah. It was the weirdest thing, though. She just, like, went into this coma."

  I stopped chewing. "A coma?"

  "Yeah. It was the strangest thing ever, I swear. It wasn't like a normal concussion or whatever. She wasn't just knocked out. She was officially comasized."

  Poor Céline. Comasized twice by changelings. That had to be a record. It reminded me of the story Mike had told me when I'd first met him. "Did he tell you that he already put someone else in a coma before? Before he became a changeling?"

  Becky nodded her head vigorously. "Yeah. That's how we knew there was something really weird going on."

  "Weirder than a guy turning into an ogre and freaking out? Boy, our sense of reality has really shifted, hasn't it?" I chuckled.

  "Seriously. Anyway, it's like he has this Hulk-smash thing going on. If he gets mad enough and smashes you—boom—you're out for, like, days. It's not normal ogre stuff. He's like an ogre with a magic fist."

  "Wow. That's inconvenient, for Céline anyway."

  "Yeah. She woke up later, and she's fine now. But she said she had the weirdest dreams while she was out." Becky's ey
es went super wide.

  "Really?" I stopped eating again. "Like, what kind of dreams?"

  Becky lowered her voice to a near whisper. "She wouldn't say anything to us, but a certain someone overheard some things being said in a private room…I won't mention any names." She looked over at Tim and winked at him while he strutted around in a circle before she continued. "Anyway, it's like she had visions. She literally saw the Forsaken."

  Food got caught in my throat and I started choking. Finn clapped me on the back several times and helped dislodge the piece of pasta that had gotten stuck in there. "Seriously?"

  "Yep. Serious as a heart attack," said Finn, also whispering. "Some craaaazy stuff has been happenin' around here." He let out a hiss of air. "And I'll tell you what…I sure am glad I'm not sittin' in that council room with y'all. I'd rather just live my life in ignorance. Just tell me where to go and what to do. Point me in the right direction and I'll shoot, but don't tell me who, why, or how."

  "Must be nice to live in ignorance like that," I said. I couldn't believe nobody on the Council had thought it might be a good idea to tell me about what had happened to Céline and the visions she'd had. That should've been the first thing out of her mouth at that meeting I'd just left. I needed to talk to her and find out what she knew.

  "I can see by the look in your eye that you're about to fly off the handle at someone and insist they tell you what's going on," Becky said. "But don't bother asking her, because she's not going to tell you anything."

  I put my fork down. "Why not?"

  She shrugged. "I have no idea. But she isn't telling anyone except Dardennes. They didn't even tell the Council. They made a pact, and that's that—end of story, like it never happened."

  Tim paused with his strawberry murdering to nod. "That's true. They decided to keep it to themselves. It's an official Silver Elf Secret."

  Whatever that is. "And why didn't you tell me?" I asked the stupid little pixie who was definitely enjoying the fact that he knew something none of the rest of us did.