Midnight's Daughter (34 page)

I scanned the garden, sword in hand, but didn’t see him. The inside of the arbor was like a dark wound beside the brighter stucco—I couldn’t see inside it, and the rain and the ominous rustling of the vines meant that there was little chance of hearing him. If he was even in there.

I glanced around, but there weren’t many other hiding places in the immediate vicinity. The palm trio was still smoking, despite the downpour, and was no longer in a position to hide much of anything. The graveled path to the front was clear, and the nearest vineyard didn’t start for a couple dozen yards.

I saw something move among the vines, a black ripple that darted between rows, silent and dangerous. Slipping quietly on the wet earth, I moved out of the ring of lights circling the house and into the darker reaches beyond. It wasn’t as dark as I would have liked—the lightning had grown worse, flashing silver strobes across the landscape—but it was better than remaining silhouetted against the floodlit stucco, practically begging to be attacked.

The air quivered like something stretched beyond bearable tension as I slowly crossed the yard, closing in on whatever was hiding in the vines. These weren’t nearly as large as the venerable specimens in the arbor, which looked like the conquistadores themselves might have planted them. But they were mature enough to give decent cover. It wasn’t until I was almost on top of my prey that I realized what it was.

A figure stepped out of the vines, wreathed in shadow, its face only a pale smudge through sheets of rain. My hair was plastered to my skin, my tunic heavy and waterlogged, but around the newcomer a bright pennant of hair lifted on a gust of breeze. Eyes clear as water met mine. I gripped my sword tighter and thought some very rude things. Fey. Perfect, just perfect. Then the attack came, blindingly fast and unbelievably strong, and I didn’t have time to think at all.

My sword was struck aside in the first rush, and went spinning off across the vineyard. It had to have gone fifty yards, and in the dark among the dense planting, I’d never find it. Something slashed through my sleeve and I jumped back, behind a vine that suddenly leapt off its row to slither around my feet, dumping me in the mud. I rolled aside and something silver flashed down, quick as the lightning and just as deadly, missing me by maybe a millimeter.

And then everything stopped. “Heidar!” The voice was shrill. “What do you think you’re doing? Stop it right now!”

I sat up, and although mud and blood and a few bird entrails that I must have missed fell into my eyes, I didn’t need sight to recognize that voice. “Claire!”

“Dory—where are you? Freaking rain! It’s after nine in the morning and I can’t see shit.”

I got to my feet and eyed the very abashed-looking Fey in front of me. Lightning flashed, showing me blond hair and pale blue eyes. Not the one I’d been dreading, then. Claire burst through a gap in the vines and reinforced that impression by smacking him on the shoulder. He had to be six feet five and was surprisingly well muscled for a Fey, but he cringed slightly.

“What did I tell you?” Claire was furious, and in characteristic fashion, she decided to set him straight before bothering with the pleasantries. I leaned back against a fence post and waited it out. Luckily for Radu’s future harvest, the vine kept its leaves to itself.

A few minutes later she wound down enough that I managed to insert a sentence into the tirade. “I’ve been looking for you,” I offered mildly.

Claire’s forehead unknotted slightly. “I knew you would. I was only gone a couple of days, but the damned Fey timeline isn’t in sync with ours and… anyway, I hope you didn’t worry.”

I thought back over the last month, to the sleepless nights and the restless days, to the fights and the calls and the threats and the beatings, and I smiled. “A little.”

“I’m really sorry, Dory, but you won’t believe everything that’s—” She caught me peering at her face and grabbed her nose, looking mortified. “Oh, God! Am I morphing? Tell me I’m not morphing!”

“Uh. No. Are you supposed to be?”

“Only in Faerie, so far.” Claire looked relieved. “Don’t stare at me like that! It freaks me out.”

“Sorry. I just… aren’t you supposed to have pointy ears or something?”

“Vulcans! Vulcans have pointy ears. Do I look like an alien to you?”

“No, but you never looked much like a Fey, either.”

“I would like to apologize for my mistake, lady,” Heidar said, jumping in during the nanosecond pause in the conversation. He’d obviously been around Claire for a while. “I was under the impression that you were a vampire.”

“I get that a lot,” I said kindly. “I’m Dory.”

The Fey brightened. “Is this where I introduce myself?” he whispered in a loud aside to Claire, who looked horrified.

“Oh, God.”

“I have been practicing,” Heidar informed me proudly, then launched into a recital of what had to be fifty names, most with explanations.

“Never ask them their names,” Claire advised as Heidar rattled on. “Just. Don’t.”

“Okay. It seems you’ve been busy.” I poked her in the middle. “Anything in there I should know about?”

She blanched. It made her freckles stand out like spots on white paper. “How did you hear about that?”

“Are you kidding me? So far, I had that runt Kyle—”

“I hate him. I hate all vamps. That complete
toad
, Michael—”

“—tell me you were pregnant by a vamp—”

“—kidnapped me and—Kyle said
what
?”

“—and then a member of the Domi shows up and informs me—”

“The Domi sent someone
here
?”

“—that you’re actually pregnant by the late king of the Fey.”

“Late?!” Heidar squeaked.

I stopped and looked at him. His hair was miraculously still mostly dry, despite the downpour. Claire’s, on the other hand, was as wet as mine, frizzing and straggling around her face like a dead animal pelt. It was hard to believe they were both half-Fey.

“Let me guess, you’re Alarr?”

“It means Elven general,” Heidar enlightened me automatically. “But, please, lady, I beg of you, tell us what you know of my father.”

“I’m sorry, not a lot. Only that he’s missing and presumed dead.”

“That is impossible,” Heidar said with conviction.

I didn’t feel like arguing the point, especially when I suspected he might be right. “Okay.” I looked at Claire sternly. “You want to tell me what’s been going on?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Hit the highlights.”

“Well, Heidar and I met at work—he’d come to bid on something—only my boss—you remember Matt, the gorilla in a suit?” I nodded. Her former boss at Gerald’s did look frighteningly like a shaved ape. “He’d decided to sell me to Sebastian, who’d finally tracked me down, only it didn’t work out quite like they’d planned. Heidar and I escaped into Faerie, but the damned Svarestri
attacked
us. We got away—you don’t even
want
to know how—and made it back to New York, but when I stopped by the house, Michael grabbed me for the bounty—” She stopped suddenly, looking stricken.

“Which you failed to mention to me.”

Claire rallied quickly. “I knew how you’d react, Dory! And you don’t know what the family is like. They’re… they can be very bad news.”

“So can I.”

“See!” Claire screeched. “See, I knew that’s what you’d say! You’d have gone stomping off—”

“I don’t stomp.”

“—to see Sebastian, and my slimy excuse for a cousin would have had you killed! He was surrounded by bodyguards all the time, the little shit, and most of them were mages. With some of their spells, well, they can take down vamps, you know?”

“And we’re talking about him in the past tense because?”

“Oh, Heidar killed him,” she said, as an afterthought. I decided not to ask or we’d be here all night.

“So Michael kidnapped you and took you where?” I prompted.

“To Sebastian, for the bounty. Only of course Seb was dead and the family was busy fighting over the inheritance and couldn’t be bothered. Michael was actually pissed at me, like I’d
asked
him to kidnap me or something. But I told him I was carrying a half-Fey child and that its father was the king, and he couldn’t kill me then because the Fey would—”

“Separate his worthless head from his spineless body,” Heidar managed to get in.

“So you
aren’t
pregnant?” I asked for clarification.

“Um,” Claire said. And stopped.

“Er,” Heidar added, blushing.

I looked between the two of them. Obviously, Caedmon’s story had been off by a generation. Then I recalled something. “A couple of
days
?!”

“Um, yes, well, it was more like a week, actually—”

I held up a hand. I was soaking and cold and my shoulders hurt. The details I could do without. “Just tell me how you got away from Michael. I know you were at the caves.”

“That place,” Claire said, wrinkling her nose in Virgo disgust for such disorder. “Michael decided to sell me to some dark mages he knew for a null bomb. He figured he could at least get something for his trouble that way, only the mages said they wouldn’t touch me until they checked with the Fey. But Michael had been carting me around for over a day trying to get a paycheck and—”

“Where were you?” I asked Heidar.

He looked sheepish. “I opposed Claire’s wish to return to your home. The Svarestri do not know the human world well, but they have occasionally ventured here. I considered the risk to be—”

“I was only going to leave a quick note,” she said testily.

“So you ditched your only bodyguard with—let’s see—the mages, the vamps and Fey after you?”

“There’s no reason to take that tone, Dory. And anyway, this was
before
Michael. I didn’t know the vamps were after me, too.”

I let it drop. We were going to have a very long conversation at some point, but not now. “Okay. So you got away from Michael how?”

“I was trying to tell you.” Claire glared me into submission. “
So
Michael got pissed at the mages, who wouldn’t pay him until they were sure they’d actually be able to harvest me, and he trashed their place. You’ve never seen anything like it. Bodies everywhere, and so much blood and—you know how I feel about blood. I may have passed out.”

I gave her a look. Claire gets nauseous from a paper cut. She sighed. “Okay, I did pass out. And when I woke up, I was being taken to the auction. Michael had found some guys who used to work for the mages who weren’t the kind to ask questions—”

“And Drac found you there.”

“Yes. He just took me; didn’t pay or anything. Then we went to this total
rathole
of a motel—I mean that literally; it had rats. You could hear them in the walls—” I nodded. Drac must not have wanted to risk my leaking his Bellagio room number to the Senate and moved to the other extreme of the spectrum. “—and one of his men kept
eating
them, and I said I was going to be sick and went outside and they’d left the keys in the car—”

“They didn’t have wards around the place?” As soon as I said it, I realized how stupid that was.

Claire raised an eyebrow, dislodging some water from her bangs, which ran into her eyes. “Damn contacts! That’s the other reason I had to go home; I haven’t been able to see anything for
days
. ‘Extended wear,’ my ass,” she mumbled, fishing around in her purse for a pair of glasses.

“And you found me how?”

“I didn’t. That’s why I was so surprised to see you. Of course, I told Heidar all about you”—she thumped him again—“and said you might catch up with us sooner or later, but he never listens, and anyway, if you’d checked the answering machine, you’d have already known I was okay. I left—I don’t know—like, ten messages, starting last night—”

“I’ve been kind of busy.”

“And you never answer your cell phone.”

“My cell had a little accident.”

“Anyway, I found Heidar lurking around the motel—he’d found me but couldn’t get through the wards—and we drove around until we saw this great hotel that does tours of the vineyards. Then I remembered when I was looking at that magazine article about the wine country, you said your uncle had a house around here, and I thought maybe he’d know where to find you. So we asked around and here we are.”

I looked into her triumphant face and found myself utterly speechless. She’d been on a tour of the wine country. While half of Faerie chased her and I went slowly out of my mind, she’d been eating crackers and debating the merits of last season’s merlot.

I finally managed to unclench my jaws enough for speech. “Claire. This is very important. Did you accidentally take down the wards when you arrived?”

“What wards?”

“You might not have noticed, but Radu has a rather elaborate ward system.”

Claire blinked at me. “Why would he need that kind of protection? I mean, he is a vampire, right?” She stopped abruptly and stared at me, a hand coming up to cover her mouth. “Oh, listen, Dory, when I said I hate all vamps, I didn’t mean, you know, the
good
ones—”

“Svarestri,” Heidar hissed, in a tone so unlike his previous cheerful ones that I looked around for a moment, expecting to see someone else. But I saw only dark leaves against a deep gray sky, and heard only sheeting rain.

Then, like the shadow of a shark just beneath the surface of the sea, fluid and dangerous, a shape appeared out of the vines. A gust of wind tangled my hair, carrying a scent like cold midnight that chilled me to the bone. A second shiver of darkness joined the first, then another, and then two more. It looked like we had company.

Like a cold current in a warm sea, something parted the rain. I could sense everything going on around me with preternatural clarity: the scurrying of hoofed and clawed feet as Radu’s terrors found something scarier than themselves; the rhythm of my own nervous breathing; the slight sucking sounds of light footsteps sneaking up behind me. I felt poised on the crest of a wave about to break.

“Get her out of here!” I told Heidar. “I’ll slow them down.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” Claire was at her incandescent best. “I can help—”