“How far did you get?” Millicent said, right over the top of me.
“I'm not sure,” Christopher admitted. “Somewhere out over I-90. Too hard to tell from here.”
“Is this a bad thing?” Anxiety leaked into my voice despite my best efforts to hold it back. The old Warder was brusque almost to the point of fright, and she stared now at Christopher as if she'd never seen him before. Given everything that'd gone on in the last many hours, that alone was enough to disturb. “I mean, how bad can it be? We still have no time to care about this, right? We have to care about Jude!”
Millie scowled at me as if I'd distracted her from trying to figure out exactly why the world as she knew it had spun around sideways. Then, grudgingly, she bobbed her head at me. “You're right, girlie. You're right. And if she's in Bellevue, there's only one thing to do.”
Christopher stiffened beside me and then pulled himself up taller. “Are you saying what I think you're saying, Millie?”
“Damn straight, boy.” She jabbed a finger at each of us in turn, once to me and twice to him for good measure. “I don't know what in God's name is going on with you and I'm going to find out. But you, long as your range is expanding, you're going to take advantage of it. Find Jude. Get her the hell back here.”
Of course, there was the question of how the hell Christopher and I were going to get to Jude in the first place.
Millie waved that off as soon as I brought it up. “My car's parked six houses up the street,” she said, and before I could do more than blink she testily appended, “I don't want to hear it. I'm still all right driving in daylight, and I thought we might need the damn thing under the circumstances. It gives me no pleasure at all to be right.”
“I wasn't going to say anything,” I protested while she bodily hauled me to the door. Christopher, behind me, plucked my shoes off the bamboo rack along the wall and handed them to me. His face was as straight as mine, though the glance he shot me mirrored my own surprise that Millicent had actually bothered to drive. Neither of us, I suspected, wanted to think about what this said about the chances of the city eventually being on fire.
“Good.” She thrust a key ring of tarnished bronze at me, a ring large and heavy enough I could have worn it as a bracelet. Then her mouth twisted, and her eyes glimmered with what I'd come to learn was all the softening she'd allow herself whenever speaking of certain thingsâlike her dead husband. “Car was Jonathan's. It's a brown Volvo. Be careful with it. Go!”
We went. It didn't take long to find the car. It was right where Millie had said it would be, and exactly the sort of huge, unwieldy road tank I'd have expected an old lady like Millicent Merriweather to drive. Christopher eyed it dubiously, for which I couldn't really blame him. “You better drive,” he said as we reached it, heading around to the passenger side. “I don't know if I'll be able to take that thing across the lake.”
I wasn't sure I'd be able to drive the thing five feet, much less across Lake Washington, yet I didn't argue. My only problem was a general dislike of cars coupled with an unfamiliar automatic transmissionâAunt Aggie had taught me to drive in her little hatchback, which was manual. Christopher, though, would risk being physically unable to drive the vehicle outside the boundaries of Seattle. Not a chance you want to take when you're eastbound on the 520 bridge and you have nowhere to pull off if you stall.
We got on the road readily enough, though I couldn't keep my left foot from tapping nervously where a clutch should have been. Despite its size the car drove smoothly, but it was still a far larger vehicle than I was used to handling. Most of my concentration went by necessity to driving as I aimed us southward towards Montlake, and most of the rest of it spun in restless circles around the idea of what the hell we'd do when we caught up with Jude. But that left me with just enough to cast periodic glances at Christopher as I drove.
He had a strange, strained look on his face, and like me, he seemed hard pressed to keep his hands and feet from fidgeting. No, more, for he had nothing to occupy them with. Ditto for his eyes, turned almost as gold as my own by broad daylight and the tension lashing at us both. His gaze roved in all directions, from me to the road to the cars we passed and back again.
It was plain he wasn't okay, any more than I was, so I didn't bother with what would have been a stupid question. “I'm pretty sure I won't run us off the road,” I said instead, “but that's assuming you sit still. Can you chill?”
“Ask me that again if I make it across the lake.”
We'd made it down to Twenty-Fifth Avenue by then, just shy of where it would take the long turn to Montlake and ultimately to 520. The water gleamed off to my left, silver-blue beneath scattered clouds. It looked harmless. Yet it was the physical boundary that split Seattle from the Eastside, and as I understood it, it had been the eastern edge of Millicent's existence for just about all of her adult life. Christopher had had barely any time at all to resign himself to the new perimeter of his world, but he stared out at Lake Washington now as if it were filled with burning oil.
“We get out onto the bridge and you feel anything, you tell me,” I said with stern concern. I liked that look on his face even less than the hangdog expression he'd had at having to leave the concert. “Even if it's nothing but an oncoming sneeze. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Christopher murmured, a wealth of barely repressed agitation in that one syllable.
He didn't say another word until we reached 520; he never got the chance. The first few bars of the theme song from
The X-Files
, the ringtone I'd set for Jude on my phone, abruptly whistled through the car. It was all I could do to keep one hand steady on the wheel, and with the other, fish my phone out of my pocket and tap the screen to accept the call. Stupid to do it while I was drivingâbut stupider, I told myself, to give away that Christopher was in the car with me.
“
Chica
,” I chirped into the device, with a brightness I didn't feel. “How's it going?”
“Amazing, actually! I feel better than I ever have before in my life. That is what you texted me about, isn't it, Ken?”
Christopher didn't utter a word, though his gaze was locked on me now, hot and sharp. That was all for the good, since it kept his attention off the vista of Lake Washington rolling past us as we crossed the floating bridge. I shot him a look I hoped conveyed the worry I didn't dare let into my voice. “Well, yeah,” I admitted as casually as I could. “You had us all worried, running off like that.”
Laughter sounded in my ear, a throaty chuckle that would have told me all on its own that Jude wasn't herself. “That's so sweet. Does that
all
include my lovely, lovely Elessir?”
“Elessir's not in any shape to comment.” Which was true in and of itself, and all I was willing to reveal about him. I wasn't about to go into what he'd said about the
alokhiu
, not when I was clearly talking to itâherânow. “And I'm more concerned about you anyway. Where are you? What are you up to?”
“Bellevue Square! You know, people-watching, window-shopping, that kind of thing. Also? The most sublime chocolate sundae it has ever been my pleasure to experience, served me by the most delicious-looking of men.”
I scowled. I could have imagined Jude rhapsodizing about those very things, except for the purr thrumming through her words. Not once had I ever heard her sound so carnal. Don't get me wrongâwe'd done our share of caffeine-fueled all-night marathons of our favorite movies and shows, ogling half a dozen different actors. But this was different. Hunger, Elessir had said. From the sound of her, whatever was left of his wife was beginning to indulge her appetites.
“Sounds great,” I said, while the car reached the east side of the lake. Christopher was still watching me, and to my relief he still looked all right, though he threw a long nervous stare out the window as soon as our wheels came off the bridge. “What do you say to some company?”
“Aw, you don't have to come all the way to the Eastside just for little old me.” Though the lush purr didn't leave her voice, the barb emerging beneath it was plain. “Besides, I thought Millie dearest had you on her leash, you and that big strapping Boy Scout of yours. Thought you were too busy for us plain vanilla humans.”
The exit south to Bellevue was coming up fast, and I had to fight to keep my one-handed diversion onto the off ramp as smooth as possible.
Chill
, I ordered myself. “Don't be silly,” I answered, praying all the while that I still sounded at ease, and that this was Jude's uninvited guest talking and not Jude herself. It was hard, given how my throat had tightened up. “Millicent made me leave for a while before I did something stupid like kick Elessir's ass. I was coming to the Eastside anyway, thought I'd look for a Hawaiian shirt for Christopher for Halloween. After all, if I'm going to be Zoe, he's got to be a proper Wash.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Christopher wince oddly, like he was caught between laughing and crying, and sure that either way it was going to hurt. I knew just how he felt. On top of everything else, I hated having to lie to my best friend. Lying was supposedly a much bigger deal for the Sidhe than it was for humans, but then again, whoever had said that hadn't seen my Aunt Aggie's face the one time I'd lied to her as a child. Jude's mind and possibly her life were much bigger stakes than the vase my seven-year-old self had shattered, and this lie was far more justifiedâyet I still thought of Aggie's disappointed eyes.
No pressure or anything.
“A costume for your Boy Scout,” Jude drawled. “I can't imagine how you could fit me into such a vital mission.”
“You're going to be Inara, remember?” That at least was truth. I fervently hoped that my true, real friend, however much of her was cognizant of this conversation, would know that. “We can hunt for pieces for your outfit too.”
“Well, as long as we're talking about buying clothes, I suppose I could pencil you in, Kennie darling. Do hurry, though. I'm not going to wait long, not when I've got such a plethora of delights before me. Ciao!”
She hung up without bothering to tell me where in the maze that was Bellevue Square I'd actually find her, leaving me with no choice but to stuff the phone back in my pocket and keep driving. So I drove, and I scowled, and blinked through furious tears threatening to well up on the edges of my vision.
“I didn't like the sound of what I could hear of that,” Christopher said, in one of the darkest tones I'd ever heard him muster. The last time he'd used it, he was telling me about his mother's death. And now, like a punch to the gut, I knew all too well how he must have felt.
“It's got her,” I whispered. My voice was raw. “It's changing her.”
“We'll stop it. We'll find Jude and we'll help her.”
There was nothing to do but find a place to park once we pulled off 405 into downtown Bellevueâand hope to God he was right.
Under normal circumstances, both before and after my fey blood had come online, I'd never much bothered to come to the Eastside to shop. Downtown Seattle was always more my speed, anywhere I could get to by bike or bus. For Christopher, though, Bellevue might as well have been the surface of Mars. His expression grew stranger as I got us a spot in one of Bellevue Square's network of parking garages. As we got out of the car, he put first one foot and then the other onto the concrete, slowly, as if he half expected the entire structure to collapse beneath us.
I watched him, frowning, while he closed the door on his side of the car and then came round to join me at mine. “So far so good?” I asked, while I locked the vehicle behind us.
He nodded, his gaze distant, gone a little gold, and then took my hand. Through that contact, I felt his power tentatively questing downward, seeking a route through concrete and rebar to the living earth beneath. “It feels like it's mine, but not quite,” he murmured after a moment. “Weak. Bit wobbly. Not like I feel Seattle. I shouldn't be feeling it at all.”
On impulse I wrapped my own magic around his, supplanting the contact of our fingers. “Millie thought I might have something to do with it, because we're linked. Try it again?”
Christopher did. The second probe of power was steadier, and with a brief, shocked laugh, he said, “That made it feel stronger. Like Seattle. Like you. Millie may be right.”
Could I really be short-circuiting the natural barriers of Christopher's Warder power? The entire concept seemed too much to take in, but then again, he was as new to his abilities as I was to mineâand while Millicent was an excellent teacher for him, I had to admit I was pretty much tagging along for the ride. Other than basic exercises of control, she still hadn't figured out yet what to do with me.
And Elessir had told me before I was the daughter of the most powerful Seelie mage in recent history. What else was I going to discover I could do? How else was I going to affect the man I loved?
Cold fear splashed down my skin, and I fought it off by pulling him into my arms and hugging him hard. “As long as you're okay, that's the important thing. I don't know what we're going to find when we catch her. But before we do, Christopher⦔ I pulled back, but only far enough to look up at him. All at once I flailed for words and couldn't think of anything better to do than just
saying
it. “I love you. Be careful.”
His eyes went wide, and then a joy both fierce and tender lit up his face. I saw that only for an instant, though. Because then he kissed me with a force I'd never felt from him before. Both our magics flared, turning everything behind my eyes a brilliant wash of white, yet that was almost irrelevant next to my sheer physical reaction to him. There was lust, sure, reassuring in its basic simplicity. But there was also a giddy, nervous excitement shooting through every nerve in my body, one I welcomed without reservation. I needed it to ward off my fright.