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ward his back would have been too careless for words.
We clattered down the stairs in our dress shoes. "What was it, Merry?"
"A dragon. A wyrm actually, since it didn't have legs."
"You saw a vision in the scars?" He got to the outside door before me, and
held it open out of long habit. I drew the gun from behind my back, clicking
the safety off.
"I thought the Host was miles away," Jeremy said.
"One lone sidhe could hide from me." I held the gun down at my side so it
wouldn't be immediately noticeable. "I won't be taken back, Jeremy. Whatever
it takes."
I stepped into the soft California night, before he could say anything. A lot
of the fey, especially the sidhe, considered modern weapons cheating. There
was no written rule against using guns, but it was still considered bad form,
unless you were a member of the Queen's, or the Prince's, elite guard. They
got to carry guns if they were protecting the royal body from harm. Well, I
was a royal body, a wee, disowned royal body, but still royal whether the rest
of them liked it or not. I had no guard to protect me, so I'd do it myself.
Whatever that took.
The night was never truly dark here-there were too many electric lights, too
many people. I searched that gentle darkness for a lone figure. I searched
with eyes, and energy, casting outward in a straining
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circle as we hurried to the waiting van. There were people in the other
houses. I could feel them moving, vibrating. A line of seagulls moved along
one of the roofs, half-asleep, moving in protest, aware of my magic sweeping
over them. There was a party on the beach. I could feel the energy rising
higher, excitement, fear, but the normal fear; should I do it, should I not;
is it safe? There was nothing else, unless you count the shivering energy of
the sea that was constantly with you near the shore. It got to be like white
noise, something ignored, like the crush of so many people, but it was always
there. Roane was somewhere in that huge rolling power. I hoped he was having a
good time. I knew I wasn't.
The sliding door of the van opened, and I got a glimpse of Uther crouched in
the dimness. He held his hand out to me, and I gave him my left hand. His hand
engulfed mine, pulling me into the van's interior.
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He slid the door closed behind me.
Ringo looked back over the driver's seat at me. He barely fit in the driver's
seat, all that muscle, those inhumanly long arms, that huge chest squeezed
down into a seat made for humans. He smiled, revealing a mouth of some of the
sharpest teeth I'd ever seen outside of a wolf. The face was slightly
elongated to accommodate the teeth, which made the rest of his more human face
seem out of proportion. The teeth flashed out of a solid brown of skin. Once
upon a time, Ringo had been a fully human gang member.
Then a group of visiting sidhe from the Seelie Court had gotten lost in the
wilds of deepest, darkest Los
Angeles. A group of gang members had found them. Cultural interaction at its
best. The sidhe got the worst end of the fight. Who knows how it happened?
Maybe they were too arrogant to fight a bunch of inner-city teenagers. Maybe
the inner-city teenagers were just a hell of a lot more vicious than the
visiting royals had expected. However it happened, they were losing. But one
of the gang members got a bright idea. He switched sides on condition that he
get his wish.
The sidhe agreed, and Ringo shot his fellow gang members to death. His wish
was to be one of the fey.
The sidhe had given their word to grant his wish. They couldn't go back on
their word. To make a full human into a part fey, you have to pour wild magic,
pure power, into them, and it is the human's will or desire that chooses the
shape of that magic. Ringo had been in his early teens when it happened. He'd
probably wanted to appear fierce, frightening, to be the toughest son of a
bitch around, so the magic had given him his wish. By human standards he was a
monster. By sidhe standards, ditto. By fey standards, he was just one of the
gang.
I don't know why Ringo left the gangs. Maybe they turned on him. Maybe he got
wise. By the time I met him, he'd been an upstanding citizen for years. He was
married to his childhood sweetheart and had three kids. He specialized in
bodyguard work and did a lot of celebrities that just wanted some exotic
muscle to follow them around for a while. Easy work, no real danger, and he
got to rub elbows with the stars.
Not bad for a kid whose mother had been a fifteen-year-old junkie, father
unknown. Ringo keeps a picture of his mom on his desk. She's thirteen,
bright-eyed, well groomed, pretty, with the world in front of her. By the next
year she was on drugs. She died at seventeen, overdose. There are no pictures
of his mother after age thirteen in his office or in his home. It's as if, for
Ringo, everything after that wasn't real, wasn't his mother.
His oldest daughter, Amira, looks eerily like that smiling picture. I don't
think she'd survive if he found her doing drugs. Ringo says that being on
drugs is worse than dead; I think he believes it.
Neither of them remarked on the gun as I slipped it back into the waistband of
my pants. They'd probably been with Jeremy when he found the gun and the
papers.
Jeremy got in the passenger-side seat. "Let's get to the airport" was all he
said. Ringo put the car in gear and away we went.
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Chapter 9
THE BACK OF THE VAN WAS EMPTY EXCEPT FOR CARPET AND A MODIFIED seat-belt
harness that Jeremy had had installed on one side. Uther's seat. I started to
crawl into the middle row of seats but Uther touched my arm. "Jeremy has
suggested that if you sit with me my aura may serve to overlap yours, thus
confusing our pursuers." Each word was carefully enunciated, because the tusks
may have looked like they came out of the skin over the mouth, out of the
face, but in reality the tusks were modified teeth, attached inside the mouth.
It meant if he were careless, he had a tendency to slur his speech. He'd
worked with one of Hollywood's leading speech coaches to learn his Midwestern
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college professor voice. It did not match a face that was more pig than human,
with a double set of tusks curling out of it. We'd had one client faint after
he spoke to her for the first time. Always fun to shock the humans.
I glanced up at Jeremy. He nodded. "I may be the better magician, but Uther's
got that older-than-God energy whirling around him. I think it'll help them
overlook you."
It was a great idea, and a simple one. "Gee, Jeremy, I knew there was a reason
you were the boss."
He grinned at me, then turned to Ringo. "It's a straight shot up Sepulveda to
the airport."
"At least we won't hit rush hour," Ringo said.
I settled into the back of the van, next to Uther. The van came out on
Sepulveda a little too fast, and
Uther caught me before I had time to fall. His big arms pulled me against him,
cradling me against a chest nearly as big as my entire body. Even with my
shields firmly in place he was like a large, warm, vibrating thing. I'd met
other fey who had no real magic to speak of, just the very barest of glamour,
but they were so old and had been around so much magic all their lives that it
was as if they'd absorbed the power into the very pores of their skin. Even
the sidhe wouldn't find me caught within Uther's arms. They'd sense him, not
me.
Probably. Initially.
I relaxed against Uther's broad chest, the warm safety of his arms. I don't
know what it was about him, but he always made me feel safe. It wasn't just
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