Gunnar and Ashley had left without further fanfare. Murdering two wolves was good enough.

I had tried cornering Tory before leaving the fight, but she had told me, loud enough for Baron Skyfall to overhear as he coincidentally walked by, that she had work to do. She didn’t say it harshly, at least her eyes had let me know it wasn’t personal and more for show, but it was also apparent that she fully meant to handle it all on her own.

I let her. But I did tell her to keep an eye on her students from Shift, just in case this was some ploy to take them away from her. Or use them against her.

Tory had been a cop so I had no doubt she would get to the bottom of the theft. But that was my concern. That her skills as a cop would lead her to an answer that would put her, the Reds, or the students at Shift in danger. Or any of my friends. That the dragons might be angling to gain control of the Beast Master to use her against my friends.

Everyone had parted ways to head home, leaving the other pack under discreet surveillance.

Talon licked his paws incessantly beside me until I shoved him in annoyance. Alex walked beside us through the twisted overgrown path at Chateau Falco, eyes alert out of habit. He had been kidnapped one too many times in his life, and now kept an eye on everything at all times.

But he would be a lot harder to kidnap now that he wasn’t a kid. I studied him out of the corner of my eye, still uneasy about his recent developments. He now resembled a tall, strong, dark-haired guy ready to take on a college campus. In the past few months, he seemed to have aged five years. Pan had checked him over repeatedly but found absolutely nothing wrong. His only suggestion was that his time in Fae had messed with his aging, or that perhaps his body was trying to catch up to the age it would have been if he had never been kidnapped by the Fae.

On a very surface level, I was kind of glad for it. I wasn’t really father material.

And it was nice not to feel the sharp paranoia whenever we went out in public together – that someone might recognize the kid beside me as the one who went missing years ago, and think that I had kidnapped him and held him prisoner this whole time. With him looking like a young college student, I was able to breathe a little easier.

He was no longer gangly and awkward – thanks to all the training my various friends had been giving him. Alex had no magic, so every one of my friends jumped at the chance to teach him how to defend himself and kill his attackers by any means necessary. He was a fast learner. To catch him up on his education, I had put him in school with a bunch of ex-murderer monsters.

I told you. I’m not good father material.

He had been in his early teens when I met him, so it wasn’t like he had much else to learn by that point. He didn’t intend to become a doctor or teacher or anything so disciplined. He wanted to be… well, like me. I decided to put him to work in my bookstore, Plato’s Cave, most nights. He wasn’t a manager yet, but he was infinitely better than Alucard had been.

As a result, Othello had been able to step into more of a CEO role of both the bookstore and Grimm Tech – my supernatural technology company. We were only just now announcing ourselves to the market to introduce some of our prototypes and gauge interest.

Of course, not all the products were available to the public. Because they were my weapons.

With Alex’s determination and work ethic, I could eventually see him doing quite well for himself at Grimm Tech if he so chose. He had a knack for seeing the forest through the trees.

But as we walked through the trail, he just listened. Intently.

Talon kicked a rock with his velvet slippers. “And the Welsh Bible had nothing else to say?” We’d gone over this a dozen times already, but I could tell he was agitated so obliged him.

I shook my head, thinking back on the book Yahn and I had… borrowed from the Vatican recently. We had given it back after copying everything we needed, but all in all, it hadn’t been as helpful as we had hoped. It had given us some answers, but like life usually worked, it only gave us additional questions.

“It filled in some blanks, but nothing majorly helpful.”

“And he still sleeps?”

I nodded. “Weird, right? Van and Baba say they found him that way. Like a cryogenic sleep.”

“What is a cryogenic sleep?” the words sounded strange coming from the squat, five-foot kitty-cat-man. He didn’t carry his white spear at the moment, but his leather kilt made steady whooshing sounds as we moved, and I thought I heard metal hilts or cross guards clinking in hidden pockets. Not that he needed blades. He was dangerous enough with just his claws.

I thought about how to explain it. “Like how Sleeping Beauty was in a living sleep, but couldn’t wake up until Prince Charming gave her a kiss.” Alex frowned, silently repeating the words as if doing so would impart understanding.

But Talon hissed. I flinched, ready for danger, but heard only birds chirping. I rounded on him. “I will not kiss this Knight,” he growled, his thick, beardlike fur quivering. He even had his long, furry ears tucked back low.

I let out a tired sigh. “No… that wasn’t what… never mind. The knight is alive, but he can’t wake up. At least, we don’t know how to wake him up.”

“How do we know he is a Knight?”

“Well, Van Helsing and Baba Yaga seemed pretty sure, but there’s no way to know until we can actually talk to him. I’ll point out that Matthias also thought he was the real deal, and he spent years looking into this stuff.”

He nodded slowly, not looking happy, but acknowledging the opinions of three old and powerful supernatural persons. “I still don’t understand how no one has found the knight these past centuries. And if the Mad Hatter is so interested in this topic, where is he?”

“Being a hermit somewhere, I guess. He took that fight with Castor Queen… hard,” I finally said, trying not to remember too many of the details. “Why are you asking about all this again?”

His claws extended and he resumed cleaning them with more force than necessary. “I’m bored.” He met my eyes between licks of those lethal claws. “Very, very bored.”

“We’ll see action soon enough…” I muttered, thinking about our upcoming trip. To Hell.

Alex shuddered instinctively. He – and everyone else – thought we were taking another one of our frequent trips to Fae. And Alex had particularly bad memories of that place.

I actually was taking Talon and Carl to Fae, but just for a brief recharge before heading onto our final destination – Hell.

Heh. Final Destination. Hell.

If any of my friends heard about that they would have tied me down to a chair for a year.

We continued down the trail, heading back to the mansion. For fun, I had taken Alex and Talon out to see my old childhood hideout – Chateau Defiance. Alex had smiled distantly, but it had seemed to sour Talon’s mood, reminding him that we had been unknowingly separated after childhood, and that I had found a new best friend – Gunnar – to replace him.

The two were still trying to come to grips with who actually held the Best Friend Title Belt, rather than accepting that it didn’t have to be one or the other.

The walk back to the mansion had been brittle rather than pleasant, thanks to Talon’s mood.

All in all, I was ready to get out of town. My friends didn’t need or want my help anyway, and I had always hated sitting on my hands.

First, we would go to Fae.

Talon and I had spent a lot of time there recently. Well, that was relative. We had only gone a half-dozen times, fearing the time slippage in the real world. I had hoped to find a calculation that would let me know how much an hour in Fae cost me in the real world.

But that had been a big fat failure.

The first time we went, an hour had cost us a day. The second time, an hour had only cost us about four hours. Repeated attempts yielded even more varied results. Basically, there was no logical explanation for the time slippage, no way to calculate it ahead of time.

And no way to explain Alex’s suddenly rapid aging.

Wylde – my inner Fae – had tried to tell me it was futile, but I had refused to listen.

Wylde…

The two of us were becoming less… distinct. Each trip to Fae brought us closer and closer until I had hard times distinguishing my thoughts from his.

The short of it was that I had been conceived and born in Fae by two human wizards. My parents had broken into Fae to steal a few things from the Queens – an Hourglass and a War Hammer – and as a result had found themselves trapped there. They hadn’t been romantically involved at the time, but being locked up in a cave for long periods of time has consequences. Something about that specific chain of events had tainted me. I was a Manling Fae or something equally bizarre. A Catalyst. I didn’t have pointed ears or anything, because I wasn’t actually Fae. I was just born there.

My parents named me Wylde.

They kept me there for years, still hiding from the Queens. Until Pan – the Wild God – came along with a rescue kitten warrior he had found in a ransacked city. I had named him Talon the Devourer, and the two of us had fast become friends. Pan agreed to help keep my parents – and me – safe from the Queens. He kind of shacked up with us like a crazy distant uncle.

To everyone’s surprise, I soon showed a knack for Fae magic. The only way I can think to describe the power was… primitive. Wizards in our world can use magic – fire, ice, wind, earth – and manipulate it to their will. But it must obey the laws of physics.

Fae magic kind of had its own unwritten set of rules, and physics was more of a quasi-flexible set of guidelines rather than concrete rules. For example, I could pull starlight from the air, use a moonbeam as a spear, command tree-people – things like that. Like I said, bizarre and not easily categorized. If I wanted something, I just kind of tried to do it. There were still rules, I think, but the drunken shaman who must have come up with them forgot to write them down.

It was more like an instinctive, primitive knowledge – fire hurts. Knives cut. People die.

When my parents were finally able to escape Fae, they blocked my memories and took me back to earth. Since they had used the hourglass stolen from the Queens, time hadn’t passed in our world – luckily, because we had spent the better part of two decades over there – and when I stepped foot on earth for the first time, I was a child again.

And I had no memories of Wylde, Talon, or the Fae.

So, I got to grow up again, totally unaware of my past.

But Wylde had spent those years haunting the Land of the Fae as some kind of spirit memory.

Reunited, Wylde and I had a lot of growing pains to overcome. He needed to be recharged by occasional visits to Fae, and I wanted to wring out every scrap of Fae magic he knew. Each visit to Fae brought us closer together, merging our lives, memories, and powers. I wanted to know – and feared – the final result of that merging, of becoming one person again.

I was a Catalyst. Cue dramatic thunder and lightning, I thought to myself.

Whatever the hell a Catalyst was, my parents had been pretty confident I was one.

Pan hadn’t known what it meant – because my parents had never told him. For Pan, the Wild God, to not know something, it had to be a doozy. Which meant I needed to go to the source.

To talk to my parents. Who currently resided in Hell. Or… at least the Underworld. Gods kind of used the terms interchangeably, informing me that there were many dimensions in the Underworld – some were paradises, and others were eons of torture and anguish.

My parents were now legal citizens of the Underworld, and Death could no longer take me on a short trip to see them because I had a lot of… dangerous questions. I had argued with him.

He had stared me dead in the eye and said, “The fact that you even know the questions is what is limiting me from taking you to them myself. The act of awareness has eliminated that path. The only way down now is to pay to play.”

He wouldn’t – or couldn’t – tell me what that price would be. Like a big girl, I had to buy my own bus ticket for this trip. I had told him to set it up.

Remembering Death’s comment from the wedding sent a chill down my spine. Three may enter, but three shall not leave… I had told Talon and Carl about it – the two I had chosen to join me because they were both otherworldly and scary as hell – but they hadn’t known what to make from it, other than the obvious. That we might not all make it back.

This hadn’t changed their minds. Both had piped up that they were willing to remain down below in order for the others to get back.

I had thoughts on that, but I had accepted their offer of support, not sharing my opinion about Death’s cryptic warning. I blinked as we finally stepped out of the woods and Chateau Falco loomed ahead over the manicured lawns.