CHAPTER 18
It wasn’t so much the low buzzing sound that woke Fiona as the tiny footsteps dancing up and down her spine. Was that a fox-trot?
Burrowing her head deeper into the pillows, she shrugged her shoulders and tried to slip back into sleep. Given how little of it she’d gotten last night, it should have been easy. But the fox-trot turned into a merengue, and she groaned into the pillowcase.
A warm wall of muscle stirred beside her, shaking the bed and rumbling low and sleepy in the dimly lit room. “D’you have a cat? I think it wants to go out.”
Burrowed deep in the hollow she’d made in the pillow, Fiona waited for his sleepy murmur to register as actual language. Then she frowned. “A cat? We’re at your apartment.”
She heard a groan and a creak and felt the bed shift to the right as Walker rolled over. Turning her head to the side, she forced her eyelids open and met his blurry gaze.
“I don’t have a cat.”
“Then what exactly is doing a cha-cha between my shoulder blades?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me what’s tangoing between mine?”
“Your Highness!”
Startled by the high, familiar voice, Fiona flipped onto her back and glared in the direction of the interruption. The small figure that had been standing astride her spine hovered just above her, gossamer wings flapping.
“Babbage? What in the Lady’s name are you doing here?”
The pixie fluttered and flitted and wrung his tiny hands together in worry. “Your Highness, I knew it was a bad idea for you to visit this place. Oh, what is your aunt going to say?”
Eyes wide, Walker pushed himself into a sitting position and dislodged his own fleet-footed visitor.
Squick tumbled head over feet down the Lupine’s torso, landing somewhere near the left knee and jumping to his feet instantly. He shook his head as if to clear it and swept Fiona a quick bow. “I telled him we shouldn’t come, Miss Fiona, but the pixie insisting. I couldn’t stop him.”
Walker looked at Fiona and scowled. “What the hell are these?”
“Pests.”
Still fluttering, Babbage lowered himself to the edge of the mattress and cast disapproving glances at Fiona and Walker. “Your Highness, would you like us to remove this… this… mongrel from your presence?”
Walker snarled at the pixie. Reaching down, Walker grabbed the sheet from where it had bunched at the foot of the bed and yanked it up to Fiona’s chin. “The only thing being removed around here is going to be those wings of yours, buddy, so watch yourself.”
Fiona hadn’t bothered to cover herself because (1) the Fae really weren’t fazed by nudity, considering how much of the population of Faerie didn’t even own clothing, and (2) Walker had seen her naked almost more than he’d seen her clothed and the only other folk in the room were Babbage and Squick. Hiding her body from them would be like hiding her body from Walker’s fictional pet cat. What would be the point?
Judging by the look on Walker’s face, though, he wanted her to stay covered. Stifling a sigh, she tucked the sheet up under her arms, made sure nothing he might consider vital was hanging out, and resumed glaring at their uninvited guests. “Okay, someone explain what the hell you two are doing here.” She stopped and frowned. “And how you got here. I tried the gate, and it was sealed.”
Both began talking at once.
“Oh, Your Highness,” Babbage cried, “how my heart stopped when I realized the gate you had used to travel to this primitive land was blocked! I nearly gave in to my despair.”
“He cried like a little girlie nymphs, miss! Moaned and wailing! I thinked my ears was bursted. But then I remembers to tried the gate that don’t come here, and here we is!”
“It was horrible, Princess Fiona. The imp dragged me into a barren wasteland of a plane, populated by terrible, fierce creatures who would gladly have feasted on our flesh.”
“Feast? Your heart not even enough for a midnight snacks. Besides, they wasn’t terrible. They was rock elementals. All they eats were dirt.”
“We had to come, Your Highness! I nearly flew into the castle wall when I looked into Her Majesty’s scrying bowl and saw you calling for help. I said to myself, ‘Babbage, you felt all along that this foolhardy trip would come to no good,’ and so it turned out—”
Fiona held up a hand to silence them. They ignored it.
“… screamed like a dryads in a forest fire, he did. It near maked my horns curls!”
She cleared her throat. “Guys, really—”
“… saw you trapped in a small room surrounded by mortals, and I knew something had to be amiss. So I told myself, ‘Babbage, old fellow, the princess needs us, and it doesn’t matter how the odds fall against us—’”
“Babbage. Squick. Really, if you’d just—”
” ‘—or what terrible creatures lie in wait to tear us limb from limb and to rend our wings from our backs, if Her Highness requires aid, then aid she will get.’ That’s just want I said, and—”
“Will you shut the hell up for ONE BLESSED MINUTE?!”
Fiona’s scream pierced the chatter and made her head, which had already begun to pound, threaten to split in two like an overripe melon. They shut up, though, so that was saying something.
Making a sound of disgust, Walker rose from the bed and stalked toward the bathroom. Fiona scowled at his back. “Where are you going?”
“To get a bottle of aspirin,” he tossed over his shoulder, “and maybe a fifth of vodka. Want anything?”
“Yeah,” she muttered, “a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”
Ever the optimist, Babbage tried again. “Your Highness—”
Seeing the look of aggravation on the princess’s face, Squick did the intelligent thing—for once—and raised his little red hand.
Fiona groaned. “Yes, Squick?”
“Miss Fiona, I gots to tell you that we was only thinking you needs us. We meant good.”
“Meant well, Squick.”
“Yeah. That’s what I says. There we was, minding we own business, practicing new scary faces in the queen’s scrying bowl, when we sawed our princess in the waters! We knowed you was here, and we knowed the queen’s bowl can see any other magicky seeing stuff, and then the waters in the bowl shotted up like the nereids was having a party! It gotted all over the floors and everywheres. I says the Queen’s Guard coulda come over here and sorts it all out, but noooooo. This one have to go playing hero. Babbage, the princess-saving pixie, or somethin’ dopey like that.”
Walker returned at that moment with an economy-sized bottle of aspirin and two glasses of water. Fiona had been looking forward to the vodka. She waved aside the tablets he offered her and snatched the bottle out of his hand. Before he could growl at her, she leaned forward and pressed two kisses to his forehead, one above each temple. When she drew back, she could see the lines in his brow ease as his headache began to dissipate. Then she took one of the glasses of water and downed it in three quick gulps. Better than aspirin any day.
He took the empty glass from her hand. “Thanks.”
She smiled at him. “You’re welcome.” When she turned back to the Fae, she wasn’t smiling. “Are you telling me that the message I tried to send through that enchanted glass actually came through? Because on this end, I barely got a glimpse of the palace before something destroyed the spell and the glass.”
“That were what we seen, too. But I telled the pixie about it being exploded and what we seen beforehands, and that’s when he gots all bended out of shapes.”
“And no one else saw?”
The imp grinned. “We isn’t allowed in the queen’s scrying rooms. She saying something about us being untrustable. So now we only goes there by sneakiness.”
By this time, Babbage had caught on to the new protocol and he was jumping up and down like a hyperactive Chihuahua, waving both of his hands in the air above his head. Fiona could see his little face turning gradually purple as he held his breath to keep himself from speaking out of turn and making her yell at him again.
She sighed. “What is it, Babbage?”
“Your Highness!” The words all but exploded from his mouth. “Your Highness, my heart nearly stopped when I tracked the imp down to the scrying chamber and he told me what he had seen! We came immediately to rescue you!” He rounded on Walker and raised his tiny fists into a boxing stance, fluttering back and forth in a Muhammad Ali meets Tinker Bell impersonation. “Stand back, loathsome sorcerer!” he shouted. “I will avenge your crimes against my mistress!”
Fiona seriously considered pulling the sheet up farther. Like over her head.
Walker raised an eyebrow and looked down at the hovering pixie. Then he raised the other eyebrow and looked at Fiona. “He’s joking, right?”
“En garde!”
Babbage’s war cry sounded more like a girlish scream or maybe a hungry baby bird, but he followed through with a direct charge straight at Walker’s throat.
What the idiot hoped to accomplish, Walker had no idea, but he put a stop to the attack with the simple defense of one large finger pressed against the pugnacious pixie’s sternum. Naturally, it overlapped onto his chest, stomach, and really most of his torso.
“I guess he’s not kidding,” Walker drawled. As if it weren’t bad enough that he’d been woken out of a sound sleep with his mate slumbering peacefully beside him, now the weird little creatures that had done the waking had decided they needed to try to poke his eyes out or something.
“Babbage, quit it!” Fiona grabbed the pixie by his tunic and hauled him away from Walker, setting Babbage down on the mattress and glaring at him sternly. “Now, how about you tell me what the hell is going on? This time without all the histrionics and melodrama.”
Walker watched the pint-sized pest struggle with what looked like a righteous sulk before he grudgingly answered the question.
“We came to rescue you,” Babbage pouted. “Why else would you have appeared in the scrying bowl, if not to cry for help? I couldn’t think of any other reason. If you weren’t being held captive against your will, you could have just returned to the gate and come home. As you should have. We didn’t realize until we tried it ourselves that the gate had malfunctioned.”
It looked like Fiona was used to being lectured by this pipsqueak, because she didn’t bother to snap at the thing the way she would have at Walker if he’d said anything close to it. They were going to have to work on that.
“I couldn’t come home,” she said. “The gate’s not working at either end, apparently. Someone put some kind of seal on it. I tried to get through a couple of days ago and ended up unconscious for a good few minutes.”
The red one, the one without wings but with tiny little devil’s horns poking out of his forehead, frowned. “That don’t sound well.”
“Doesn’t sound good, Squick.”
“That were what I said. It would takes a lot of magic to seal a gates like that, and why woulds anyone want to? The queen already keep a tight lock on who go in and out. She be more fretful over us coming here than them going there, if you take my meanings.”
“I haven’t figured out why,” Fiona said. “At first I thought it might have something to do with Uncle Dionnu and his being here for the negotiations without telling Aunt Mab about them, but that doesn’t really make sense. He’s never been afraid of upsetting her before, so why should he worry now?”
The pixie’s eyes widened. “King Dionnu is here? In the mortal world?”
“I know. That was my reaction.”
Briefly, Fiona outlined why Dionnu had come to Manhattan and what he claimed he intended to gain from the visit. Both uninvited guests looked as skeptical as their princess.
“I doesn’t know, Miss Fiona,” the red fellow said. “You knows I’m not the devious sort, but it sound to me like the king might being up to something.”
His small, pointy tail twitched from side to side as he said it, and Walker found himself suppressing a snort. The little guy looked like everyone’s childhood vision of the devil. All he needed was a pitchfork and a pointy black goatee to complete the image.
“Yeah, I had an inkling.” Fiona’s voice was dry, her mouth wry. “But I don’t have time to try and figure out what he has up his sleeve. There are other things going on that take precedence over Uncle Dionnu’s eternal quest for whatever he can get.”
“Like what?” Babbage asked.
“You mean aside from the fact that someone sealed off the gate and then put a spell on the glass and the scrying bowl to make them explode if anyone established contact between here and Faerie?” She paused. “Well, we do seem to have a couple of demons on our hands.”
“Demons?”
They said it in chorus, both tiny faces going slack with shock, then blank with horror.
“How can that be?”
“Can’t be true! Hasn’t been a demons up from Below in… in… I can’t remembers how long!”
“Maybe not where you’re from,” Walker threw in, “but here in the real world, we have the occasional visitor. Usually they’re just here long enough to eat the one who summoned them, then they go home. But these guys don’t seem to be following the standard rules. They’re sure as hell not sticking inside some tidy little circles.”
Fiona jumped in to explain what she had found, and her miniature audience listened with surprising attention. Neither one interrupted or even moved until Fiona had related the whole of the tale.
“That’s the real reason I was trying to contact the queen,” she said. “I’m afraid that if I ask too many human sorcerers, I’ll tip off the summoner that we’re on to him, so I was hoping Aunt Mab would give me access to the royal library. That way I could do some research on the sigils myself, see if I could come up with an identity of at least one of the demons. Even that much might help me trace it back to the one who called it.”
Babbage shook his head. “The queen would not like this idea, Your Highness. I believe she would be more inclined to order you to return to the palace immediately, rather than give you the keys to her library. You know she would never countenance you putting yourself in danger this way.”
“Fiona isn’t going to be in any danger. Not while I’m around.” Walker didn’t appreciate the idea of anyone implying he couldn’t take care of his mate, whether they knew she was his mate or not. If another pack member had said such a thing, there would have been a battle.
Somehow, even from two and a half feet below his eye line, the pixie managed to look down his nose at Walker. “You may be willing to try, wolf, but you can’t stop a spell the way you can someone’s fist.”
His eyes narrowed. “I can stop your mouth, if you don’t watch it, Tinker Bell.”
Fiona shushed them both. “It doesn’t really matter what the queen would or wouldn’t countenance, Babb. And it doesn’t matter who orders me to go home at this point. I can’t. The gate is sealed, and until I figure out how to get it open again—which is going to have to wait until after I take care of the demon business—I’m staying right here.”
Walker clenched his teeth. She’d be staying right here for a long time after that bloody gate was open. She just didn’t realize it yet. But there was no way in hell he’d let her leave his apartment, let alone his world. Not unless he was walking right alongside of her. He’d thought she was starting to understand after their discussion last night, but now it looked like a little more persuasion might be in order.
The little devil hopped over to sit near Fiona’s knees and braced his hands on his hips. “Can you showed me what the marks looks like? I might could be big helps.”
“How?”
Squick threw Walker an impatient scowl. “I’s an imp, that’s how. I gots friends in warm places.”
Fiona explained, “Imps are Fae, but that’s mostly because they sided with us during the Wars. They actually started out as hybrids—part demon, part Fae.”
“Part pixie, to be specific,” the imp sniffed, and shot Babbage a smirk. “But us seen which way the wind were blowing during the fighting, so we decides to sign on with the white sheep of the family and fighted for the king and queen. Since then, Their Majesties hasn’t been able to live without us.”
“Hasn’t been able to get rid of you,” Babbage grumbled.
“Haven’t,” Fiona corrected.
Wondering if maybe he should have taken those aspirin after all, Walker shook his head. “I’m starting to think I’m going to need a crash course in the history of the Fae-Demon Wars before this is all over.”
“All yous needs to know,” Squick said, puffing out his chest, “is that if anybody can finds out what demon left its sigil on these bodies of yours, I’m them.”
“It,” Walker growled.
“That’s what I said. So, can you sketches them out for me, Miss Fiona?”
She nodded and a pad and pen appeared on her lap. “The sorcerer is human, so I doubt you’d recognize his mark. I’ll just show you the sigils that named the demon and gave it its orders.” Quickly Fiona sketched the same ugly lines Walker had seen her draw in the dirt the other night. They didn’t look any prettier in the light of day or any more familiar. “That’s what I saw. I may be off a line or two, but I think I got pretty close; don’t you, Walker?”
He nodded. “That’s what I remember.”
“Do you recognize any of them, Squick?”
“Not too much. At least, nots the name glyphs,” he said, frowning. “But let me takes the paper, and I do some checking.”
Fiona swore. “You can’t. The gate is closed. Who are you going to ask if you can’t get back to Faerie?”
“There be more than one gates in this world, Miss Fiona, and not every one lead to Faerie.”
Babbage made a choked coughing sound. “You can’t mean to go Below and ask, Squick! That would be a suicide mission! Imps are about as welcome Below as demons are Above.”
Walker had heard the term “Below” before. It was how the Fae and historians referred to the plane of existence the Fae had banished the demons to after the end of the Wars. You couldn’t call it hell, but only because of the lack of the souls of dead humans. It was still a bleak, malevolent world populated entirely by demons and any Fae who had been labeled traitors during the conflict. In comparison, every place that wasn’t Below started being called Above.
Squick’s small red chest puffed out even more. “I cans handle myselves,” the imp assured them. “Some of we don’t needs wings to move fastly.”
“Squick, I don’t know. I don’t want to put you in any danger. This isn’t really your problem.”
“I puts myself where we wants to be.”
Walker frowned, and Fiona didn’t look convinced. She looked worried. Apparently, she really cared what happened to the annoying little buggers, and that meant Walker did, too.
Damn, this mate thing was already getting complicated.
Seeing the stubborn look on the imp’s face, Walker chimed in to back up Fiona and Babbage. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Squick. The information is important, but it won’t do us any good if you get killed finding it. Then we’re out the information and an imp. Can’t you find anyplace else to ask around that isn’t Below?”
“Who else be knowing about demons but themself? Well, and the Fae chroniclers, but if we can’t gets back to the palace, we can’t very well asks him, can us?”
Fiona still looked worried. “Squick, I don’t like it. Walker’s right. You could be killed.”
“I can takes care of myselves,” he said firmly. Before anyone could offer another protest, he snatched the paper from her hands and folded it into a small triangle that disappeared when he blew on it. “I finds out about your demon. Maybe if the pixie wants to make hisself useful, he can sees what’s what at the gate. At least he wouldn’t being a total wastes of magic, then.”
Babbage puffed up like a frightened Persian cat, but Fiona cut off his indignant protest. “No, I don’t like the idea of you splitting up, let alone of one of you going Below all on your own.”
Babbage turned whiter than Walker’s sheets.
Squick just snorted. “What? I is supposed to take the pixie with me? And if thing didn’t goes finely, I’s could always bargain his wings away in exchanges for safe passage. Them make good snacking, demons say.” He shook his head. “No, Miss Fiona. Better off to go and go on my owns. Sneakier that ways.” He threw Walker a speaking glance. “Faster, too.”
Walker nodded grimly. “Fast would be good.”
At least on locating the demon. The pixie could take all the time in the world figuring out what was keeping Fiona from going back through the Faerie gate, as far as Walker was concerned.
Realizing he was not being sent Below to accompany Squick, Babbage began breathing again. “Well, I’m glad that’s settled.” He cleared his throat. “I can certainly take a look at the gate and see if I can discern what kind of hex is on it and who put it there. Yes, I’m happy to do that! We all have to stick to our strengths, after all.”
He practically whistled a tune of relief, but Fiona continued to frown. “I have a bad feeling about this,” she said. “I wish you wouldn’t go, Squick.”
“Oh, Miss Fiona, you worries too much. Nothings will happen to me. I come back finer than before, you see. And I brings back the names of the demon so we can sends it back Below where it belonging. Imp’s promise.”
Walker got the feeling an imp’s promise didn’t hold quite the weight Squick had invested in it.
“All right,” Fiona agreed grudgingly. “It’s clear I can’t stop you when your mind is already made up, but I expect you to be careful. Both of you.”
The Fae nodded. “We will,” they said in unison, and they swept Fiona a pair of elegant bows before turning and blinking out of the room.
Fiona continued to stare at the spot where they had disappeared for a long minute after they had gone, and Walker sat beside her, his hand resting on her back.
“I do have a bad feeling,” she murmured, and he saw the little crease in the skin between her eyebrows. “Something bad is going to happen to them. I know it.”
Slipping his arms all the way around her, Walker tugged Fiona against his side and nuzzled her hair. “I think they can take care of themselves. You heard Squick. It will be okay, Princess.”
She raised her eyes to his and forced a smile. “Does this mate thing give you the ability to see into the future? Because if it does, I feel gypped. Where’s my new superpower?”
Walker shook his head and felt his jaw firm. “No, I can’t see the future, but I can have a little faith. And if that doesn’t work, I can always go in and haul their butts out of the fire.”