CHAPTER 23
They didn’t head straight out to hunt pixies. First, Walker had to get in touch with Graham and give him an update. It was either that, Walker explained, or take the chance of the pack leader deciding to vent the frustrations of the human negotiations on his liver. Better to get the information update out of the way.
Fiona also took a minute to put out another call before they left, and she carried the little pouch of glass with her just in case. She wished the call could reach all the way to Faerie, but it seemed that whatever curse had made the glass explode before was still forming a barrier between the worlds.
Squick made a big production of griping and grumbling over being forced to spend his time looking for a pesky pixie until Walker threatened to strangle him with his own tail. So in the end he shut up and just glared at the world from inside the canvas bag Walker had given Fiona to carry him in. Someone might notice if she walked down the street with an imp sitting on her shoulder, Walker had pointed out.
“Gate first,” Fiona said as they stepped out onto the pavement and Walker turned to lock his door. “If we’re going to retrace Babbage’s steps, we might as well start where he started.”
“Be faster to starts where he finished,” the bag grumbled.
Fiona ignored him. Her mind had enough problems to focus on already without worrying about the surly imp. Walker’s theory about the identity of the person in control of the demons had thrown a huge wrench in their plans to identify him. At least when they’d believed him to be a summoner, the pool of possible candidates had been limited to that somewhat sparse population. The idea that the culprit could now be any one of the millions of residents of Manhattan didn’t bode well for their chances of finding him. Especially not before anyone else got hurt.
It had been pretty much all bad news since she’d woken up, Fiona admitted, biting back a sigh. She’d been having a really good dream, too. Something about her and Walker and complete privacy in a lushly furnished room with sturdy locks and an even sturdier bed frame. Instead of putting all that lovely carpentry to the test, she’d been jerked out of sleep and faced with an infinitely less attractive reality.
She could practically feel the trouble brewing. Something was about to go wrong, if it hadn’t already. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she could feel it, like an itch along her skin that refused to go away no matter how much she scratched at it.
The fact that Babbage still wasn’t answering her call made her nervous. Usually, she had trouble getting Babbage to go away. He tended to stick like glue whenever she gave him the slightest encouragement and often when she didn’t. The only explanations she could think of for his silence did not reassure her.
They entered the park on the Upper West Side, off Indian Road, avoiding the tennis courts to the south and the playgrounds that dotted the edges of the parks department land. Even so, they were hardly the only ones around. In the fading light of early evening, joggers and skaters and cyclists shared the paths with strollers and sightseers. Fiona even spotted a small group of humans in hiking gear, outfitted with binoculars and field guides for identifying the birds and plants that filled the park.
She supposed that she and Walker didn’t look all that different from any of the other couples who walked together along the paths that curled through the hillsides. Blending in was helpful, but they weren’t here to take in the closest thing to fresh air that Manhattan had to offer. They took the nearest path west, heading deeper into the park where the trees thickened into surprisingly dense copses of old-growth forest.
Inwood, she had read, represented the last remnants of the woodland that had covered Manhattan when the humans had settled it only four centuries ago. Only a little longer than she’d been alive, and already they’d covered all but the smallest slivers of the island with concrete and metal and glass. She shook her head. No wonder magic had gotten so hard to come by. Faerie magic especially, since it relied so heavily on the energy of the land. Inwood Hill Park was the last piece of real land in the city and one of the only places with enough wild magic left to sustain a Faerie gate.
Walker glanced down at her and raised an eyebrow. “That’s a weird expression,” he said. “I can’t tell if you’re angry or amused. What’s going on in your head?”
“Just reflecting on how fast this place managed to go to pot once we left. Apparently, you give mortals a few centuries and they just can’t help but muck the whole place up.”
They reached a branch in the path that gave them the choice of turning north or south. Instead, they stepped off the trail and began to wend their way into the woods.
“A few centuries? Hey, you guys moved out something like three millennia ago. Now you’re going to complain about the new decorating scheme? That’s just bad manners.”
Fiona chuckled and ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch. “Yeah, yeah. Better bad manners than bad taste, is what I say.”
“Dilettante.”
“Barbarian.”
They grinned at each other and kept walking.
As the trees grew taller and thicker around them, the last of the weak sunlight faded, leaving them in a premature darkness more charcoal than black.
“Can you see okay?” Walker asked.
“Sure. My night vision isn’t as good as yours, but I get by.”
The woods muffled the noise, too. There wasn’t anywhere in the city where you could completely escape the sounds of traffic and people, but they were quieter here. The Henry Hudson Parkway ran overhead to the west, but no one else had wandered off the path with them, so Fiona didn’t hear any voices or any footsteps other than their own.
Until Squick piped up, of course.
“I’s suffocating! Air! I needs air!”
Fiona rolled her eyes and shrugged off one strap of the shoulder bag, letting it fall open to the cool evening. “You’re not suffocating, but there’s no one else around, so I suppose you can come out now.”
The imp clambered up the canvas and used Fiona’s shirtsleeve like a ladder to haul himself up to her shoulder. With much grumbling and an indignant “humph,” he prepared to settle himself down into his accustomed seat.
Walker glanced over and shook his head. “Not there, squirt. Try the other side.”
The imp obeyed and scrambled across Fiona’s shoulders to sit on the other side. Fiona looked from her shoulder to Walker with wide eyes, puzzled by the order. As soon as their eyes met, she felt the skin of the shoulder closest to him tingle and realization dawned. Squick had been about to sit on the shoulder that bore Walker’s mark. She saw the satisfaction in her mate’s expression when she made the connection, but he didn’t say anything. She supposed he didn’t need to.
Walker led the way up a hill and paused as they reached the top. “We’re getting close to the gate now, so I want you to keep your eyes open. I know we didn’t see anything last time we were here, but it was daylight then. It’s nearly dark enough now for demon activity, so stay alert, all right?”
Fiona nodded, but she wasn’t worried about demons; she was worried about Babbage.
“Miss Fiona,” Squick said suddenly, his high, childlike voice speaking right up next to her ear, “did you knows your pocket is glowing?”
Automatically Fiona looked down and saw a dim blue-silver light glowing through the fabric of her jacket pocket. It took a moment for her to remember exactly what she had put in that pocket. The little pouch of glass.
She grabbed Walker’s arm and stopped in her tracks. “Look.”
Digging in her pocket, she drew the pouch out and held it up to him. Even through the velvet, the light shining from the small shards was unmistakable. Excitement welled inside her.
“He’s here,” she said quietly but animatedly. “He’s in the park. He must be near the gate. Come on! Hurry!”
She didn’t wait for Walker’s answer, just took off into the woods. Behind her, the Lupine cursed, but she heard his long strides hurrying after her. He’d be angry with her when they reached the gate, she knew. He’d probably give her a lecture on how he was supposed to be protecting her and he couldn’t do that if she was going to take off without warning him. She didn’t care. He could lecture all he wanted after they found Babbage. Her relief at knowing he was close made her feet lighter. Finally, she was going to get some good news after way too much of the other kind.
Breaking through the tree line into the clearing, Fiona scanned the open area for signs of the pixie. She didn’t see him. Frowning, she realized she couldn’t hear his wings beating, either.
“Oh, Miss Fiona,” Squick said, but he didn’t sound quite like himself. His arrogant, petulant tone had disappeared, and in its place he sounded… sad. “Oh, Princess, this is baddie-bad-bad-bad.”
The imp jumped down from her shoulder and ran across the leaf-covered clearing to a dark patch on the ground at the foot of the Faerie door.
She felt Walker’s hand settle on her shoulder at the same time that her eyes focused on the rough stone of the gate. She had to blink before what they were seeing made sense. The dark, faintly glistening smears on the face of the rock hadn’t been there the last time she’d seen it, and neither had the series of ugly, uneven marks on the trees at either side.
In her hand, the pouch of glass glowed brightly, giving off enough light to cast the shadow of her hand on the ground at her feet. It glowed so brightly that Babbage should have been hovering right there in front of her.
The hand on her shoulder tightened and then Walker was pulling her toward him, wrapping her up in his arms and pressing her head to his chest, blotting out the sight of the gate. Numbly Fiona blinked against the soft cotton of his shirt, but the images wouldn’t go away. Even with her eyes closed, she could still see the dark, gory mess of demon signs written in her friend’s cooling blood.
Walker’s gut clenched, and he suppressed the urge to howl up into the twilight sky. He didn’t need to know magic to know why his mate stood silent and shaking in his arms. His nose told him that. He could smell the blood, thick and sweet and metallic on the night air. They had found Babbage, but the pixie wouldn’t be sharing his news with them.
Walker held Fiona tight against him, thinking savagely that he’d spent too much time lately comforting the women he loved. When he found the thing responsible for causing their pain, he was going to relish tearing it into tiny, bloody, squirming little pieces.
At the foot of the gate, Squick was bending over what Walker had thought was a pile of bloody leaves, but when the imp put one hand on the lump, he realized they really had found the pixie. Walker’s sensitive night vision hadn’t registered the small body because it had already gone cold. Babbage had been dead at least a few hours.
“I didn’t means it when I called him stupid,” Squick said, looking up at them. His puckish face was drawn into lines of confusion, like a child who couldn’t understand why Fluffy didn’t just wake up from its nap. “He not so stupid all the times.”
Walker felt Fiona shudder, heard her uneven gasps as she fought back the tears that threatened to choke her. She stirred in his embrace, and he had to force himself to release her when all his instincts demanded that he protect her from the painful sight at her back.
“I know, Squick,” she said. Walker felt a surge of pride. Her voice was thick with tears but steady and strong. His mate wouldn’t fall apart now. She knew this wasn’t the time. “Babbage didn’t think you were stupid all the time, either.”
It sounded strange to Walker, but it seemed to comfort Squick. The imp nodded and looked down at the pixie’s remains. “I don’t thinks he still want to be here, Miss Fiona. I think he probably rathers to be home. Maybe I can takes him home?”
Fiona shook her head. “I’m sorry, Squick, but the gate isn’t working, remember? We can’t get back home.”
“Oh yeah.” The imp seemed to deflate. “I forgots.”
Walker looked around the clearing, paying careful attention to the area just in front of the gate. He could see a few tracks that obviously hadn’t been left by the pixie, who seemed a lot more inclined to fly than to walk.
Walker frowned. “I think Babbage did, too. Judging by the tracks, it looks like he was killed by the same demon that attacked us when Fiona first came through the gate, which means Babbage had plenty of time to see him coming. Probably heard him, too.”
Fiona frowned. “So?”
“So, all the entrances to Faerie are warded against demons, right?”
She nodded. “Yes. There hasn’t been a demon sighted in our territory since the Wars.”
“Then I think Babbage’s first reaction was to head right for the gate. He forgot that it was sealed. He was trying to get back into Faerie.”
“But Miss Fiona telled him to comes back to her,” Squick protested, “and the pixie always do just what Miss Fiona say.”
“Maybe he did,” Walker said. “But if a demon was coming after him, he might have thought he could go through the gate and wait on the other side until the demon got sick of waiting and left. Then he could come back and talk to Fiona just like he promised.”
“He might have,” Fiona said softly. “Babbage always obeys orders, but he’s never been called courageous. If he’d seen the demon coming, he would have tried to get to safety.”
Walker put his hand on her shoulder again. The urge to comfort her was too strong to ignore. Even if he couldn’t make the pain of losing a friend go away, Walker remembered how much it had meant that she’d been there when he’d found out about Shelby.
The bond between them kept getting stronger and stronger, and if they had ever needed to share their strength with each other, now was the time.
He felt the coolness of her skin even through the covering of her shirt and jacket, but it began to warm at his touch and he felt her pull herself up. She squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath, then turned to look up at the gate.
She clenched her teeth and made a muscle jump in the side of her jaw. Walker just stood quietly while her eyes scanned the smears of blood against stone and then looked at the marks on the tree trunks. He heard her breath hiss through her teeth.
“More sigils.” Her voice shook, this time not with grief but with rage. “Damn the fiend and all of its kind for the rest of eternity! It used his blood to draw the sigils.”
Walker squinted at the dark, ugly lines and frowned. He couldn’t read them, but they did look similar to the ones he’d seen carved into the bodies of the demons’ earlier victims. “It’s still trying to break away from the amulet. I hope to God it hasn’t figured out how.”
“Squick, we need to find out exactly what those glyphs mean,” Fiona said. “Every single line of them. I want a direct translation. I don’t care if you have to ask every single demon Below to find out, but I want the answer.”
The imp looked alarmed. “But Miss Fiona, the demons doesn’t like us. They only didn’t eat us last time because I hides real good. If I talks to them, I ends up dinner for sure.”
“Fine. Then I’ll go myself. Just point me to the gate.”
Walker grabbed her and spun her around. “Hold on a minute,” he soothed. “I know you’re upset, but there’s no way I’m letting you go to hell to ask directions.”
“It’s not hell,” she snapped, her eyes flashing up at him, a mixture of anger, pain, and determination. “Don’t bring mortal religion into this. It’s just Below. It’s no different from going to Faerie.”
“Sure, except Faerie is populated by pixies and sprites and sidhe, as opposed to big, hungry demons who happen to still be holding a grudge about the way your ancestors kicked their asses.”
“I don’t care if they’re holding a grudge over the last mortal presidential election. We need this information, and if the only way to get it is to go Below, then I’m going!”
Walker drew a deep breath and wrestled back the urge to just throw her over his shoulder and be done with it. These protective instincts were becoming almost impossible to tamp down. The idea of seeing his mate put herself in danger drove him crazy. He couldn’t imagine what would happen to him if anything happened to her.
“I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Princess,” he began, clenching his teeth to keep from shouting.
“I don’t care what you think!”
He could feel his eyes flashing with temper and used all his willpower to keep it from boiling over. “And I don’t care if you’re queen of the whole goddamned universe,” Walker said, his voice dangerously low. “There’s no fucking way I’m letting you walk into some dimension full of demons. You are not putting yourself in that kind of danger.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do, wolf!”
Something tugged hard at the leg of his jeans and cut off Walker’s sharp retort.
“Um, excuses me, furry mortal guy, but you gonna have to stops with the screamings and shoutings.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, Squick,” Walker bit out, not taking his eyes from his mate, “I’m not the one doing the shouting.”
“That’s nice, furry mortal guy,” the imp said, tugging again, “but the princess be yelling so loud that nobodies need to go nowheres to find demons. They coming right here.”
Walker heard the low, menacing growl a split second before Squick screamed. Instinct took over, and Walker threw himself at Fiona, shoving her to the ground and covering her with his body. He felt the searing pain of a claw ripping into his flesh, and he howled. He braced his hands on the ground at Fiona’s side and the glow of his eyes illuminated her startled face.
“Stay down,” he hissed, and threw himself into his change.