Into the Woods (43 page)

“If you don’t, you’re going to be dead,” Jenks grumbled back. “And another thing,” he said as he preceded to run down a list of do’s and don’ts.

Ignoring him, Trent started for his contact, his feet finding a familiar, confident pace. He wove gracefully around the people who dismissed him, noting the ones who made eye contact and slid out of his way. His stomach was knotted, and he had to work hard for a casual expression. It was an odd feeling, being on his own after a lifetime spent with someone generally within earshot. His billions would be of little help today. If he failed, the Withons would kill him and stuff him in a sea grotto, but what had him worried was what would happen if he succeeded.

“Are you even listening to me?” Jenks said, tugging at the hair behind Trent’s ear, and Trent frowned.

“Yes, of course. I appreciate you being here, and I’ll let you know when I need your help,” he said, nodding to the bike courier as he closed the gap.

“Tink’s panties, I don’t know why I’m helping you. You are such a snot.”

Trent came to a halt, silently shrugging into the dull green zip-up jacket the man was handing him, then taking the bike helmet, and finally the package. A knot of tension eased as he slipped the small one-by-two-by-four box under his arm. Maybe he could do this.

“You’re not listening to me,” Jenks complained as he darted from Trent’s shoulder, his hands on his hips and his disgust obvious. The irate but tiny man took a breath, then hesitated. “Hey, you guys look a lot alike,” he said, and the bike courier smiled silently as he gave Trent a pair of sunglasses and, without a word, tossed his short, almost white hair back and strode for the doors leading out to the loading area.

“Pretty close.” The soft sound of feet sliding pulled Trent’s eyes back to the bathroom, and he stiffened, turning halfway around as the would-be sniper staggered out, a hand holding a wad of brown paper to his nose. From the loudspeaker came a final boarding call. The assassin spotted the slim shape of a man in black spandex slip through the doors to the platform, and he staggered into a run, his hand slapping his coat where his two-way had been.

“Pretty slick, you mean,” Jenks added, seeming to have forgiven Trent as he put the sunglasses on his nose and headed out the King Street entrance. “That’s good planning right there.”

“I have the luxury of time.” The temperature shifted, becoming warmer, damper as Trent went through the first set of twin doors. Traffic passed, and people intent on getting where they wanted to be. Just as expected, no one noticed him in his courier uniform, and he zipped his dull green jacket up against the possible rain. Risking a look back through the milky windows, he saw the sniper just make the train. Another knot eased, and then he tensed right back up again. He had hardly started. A sleek bike leaned against a nearby rack, chained with a familiar lock, and he strode to it.

“But you’re as sloppy as Rachel,” Jenks said loudly, his dust blown away by a traffic-born gust. “Money will get you only so far, and then I’m going to have to work my wings off keeping you alive. Especially if you don’t unplug your sphincters and tell me what you’re doing.”

Setting down the box, Trent crouched beside the bike and looked up at Jenks perched on the bike’s rearview mirror. “Unplug my . . . Excuse me?”

Hands on his hips, Jenks lifted his wings in a pixy’s version of a shrug. “Keep thinking I’m fluff, and I’ll kill you myself. I work best when I know what the general theme is.” He tracked a passing man. “Quen at least took me
seriously
. Let me do my
job
.”

The lock clicked open, and Trent stood, tossing it to the side, unneeded. It would be better if the rain would hold off for an hour or so, but what were the chances of that?

“I can do more than look pretty here!” Jenks shouted, darting back off the bike as Trent fit the package in the saddlebag and swung his leg over.

“I could have made sure that you beaned the right guy,” Jenks continued as Trent took his round fabric cap from his belt pack and lined his bike helmet with it. “Saved you five minutes right there. Did you know the camera sweeps are only once every three minutes? You could have been invisible, but nooooo! Ignore the pixy! No dust off my ass, but if you aren’t alive to help Rachel tomorrow, I’ll be pissed.”

“It was a negligible risk.” Trent fastened his helmet under his chin, not needing to adjust the straps. “By the time someone looks at the tapes, it will be too late.”

“You were lucky!” Jenks shouted, loud enough to make a passerby glance up, mildly curious at seeing a pixy arguing with a courier. “You could be dead on the tile right now, leaving Rachel up crap creek without her Kalamack life preserver.” The pixy darted close, and Trent refused to back up as a silver dust tickled his nose. “We need to get one thing straight, cookie fart,” Jenks said, poking his nose with the tip of his sword. “Either you include me, or you don’t. Tell me now so I can catch the next train south and maybe get there in time to save her ass. I’m not here for you, not here for your elf quest, and not for whatever bauble we’re stealing back from your old girlfriend. I’m here to keep you alive so you can help Rachel.”

Squinting at the pixy, Trent sat where he was, wanting to move but forced to deal with this first. Having to explain himself was almost as bad as someone telling him no without options. But he’d been accused of being too hard to work with before, and learning the knack of seeming to include others in his decision making even when he wasn’t would be good in the long run. Or so Quen said.

“Well?” the pixy snarled, and Trent quashed a sudden feeling of angst.

“It’s not a ring we are stealing. It’s my child.”

Jenks choked, dropping three inches before finding the wind beneath his wings. Embarrassed, Trent pushed the bike in motion, checking behind him before taking the low curb and entering into traffic. He could hear pixy wings, but he kept his eyes forward, an increasingly familiar feeling of repressed unease seeping into him as his legs took on the stress of a hill. He shifted the gears and stood up on the pedals, the bike swaying from side to side with his weight. He should have worked harder to keep Ellasbeth happy, but by God, the woman was bitter, vindictive, and so smart that she couldn’t get a joke.

“Child?” Jenks said, flying backward two feet in front of him. “You mean like a baby?” He checked behind him and rose up as Trent went around a parked car. “You and Ellasbeth, right?” he asked as he dropped back down. “Eewww . . .”

Trent kept pedaling, his breathing quickening. This had been a mistake.

“He’d be what, five months?” Jenks asked from behind him, drafting. “The marriage Rachel broke up was to make an honest woman out of her? Damn!”

“She’s three months,” Trent said, recalling the baby sites he’d been lurking on. She wouldn’t even be sitting up yet, just learning how push up on her palms and possibly reach for things. “The marriage was to solidify the East and West Coast clans divided by the Turn. Lucy is the physical show of that, and whoever raises her will chart the next thirty years until she can do it herself. Ellasbeth would keep us hiding, and to survive the resurgence of our numbers, we must have the strong feeling of community that coming out of the closet would give us.”

The pixy whistled, and Trent sat down as the hill crested, easily coasting with traffic. Worry furrowed his brow. He’d been raised by nannies and paid caretakers. His mother and father had been loving but distant figures. He wanted to be more than that to his daughter.

“Lucy?” Jenks said, not breathing hard at all as he caught up. “You named her Lucy? The elven golden child is named Lucy?”

Trent squinted at the pixy, the wind pulling Jenks’s dust away almost as fast as it fell from his wings. “It’s a family name,” he said coolly. Ellasbeth’s family name. He would’ve named her something grander. Lucinda, Lucianna, or Lucile, perhaps.
What am I going to do with a baby?

Again the pixy laughed, and Trent made a quick right turn, Jenks’s chiming voice going faint as he missed it. “Oh. My. God!” Jenks said as he caught up, landing on the bar between the handles and folding his wings to avoid wind damage. “Rachel is going to crap her panties when she finds out you’re a daddy! Trent, you dog!”

They were getting close to the waterfront, the traffic easing slightly in the largely tourist area. The bike hummed up through him, and he turned sharply to avoid a cobbled street. Jenks wasn’t laughing nearly as much as he thought he would. “You can understand why I didn’t tell her,” he muttered, and Jenks lost his mirth.

“No, not really.” One hand holding his wings tight to his body, Jenks turned to look behind him at their forward progress. “Rachel makes enough mistakes in one week to fill a twenty-yard dump truck.”

“Lucy wasn’t a mistake,” Trent said hotly.

They were among the darker shade of large buildings, and Trent watched Jenks shiver. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, holding up a hand in protest. “You don’t give Rachel enough credit. She won’t think twice about it.” He hesitated, looking up at the towers. “Once it sinks in. You really have a kid? For realsies?”

There was an unexpected relief at Jenks’s reaction, and it bothered him. What did he care what a pixy thought—even if that pixy had Rachel’s ear?

Distracted, he adjusted the rearview mirror attached to the handlebars, and Jenks cleared his throat. “No one is following you,” he said, taking to the air as they paused at a stop sign for five eager tourists to cross. “Why do you think I’ve been sitting with my back to the wind?”

“Thank you.” Trent pushed himself back into motion, and Jenks landed next to his ear. The streets were all downhill, and Trent was starting to see other cyclists with logos and colorful patterns on their tights. His pulse hammered, responding to his tension, not the road.

“But you gotta tell me what the plan is,” Jenks prompted. “I get the black-jumpsuit-biker thing. It was a good idea. Beaning the next guy through the bathroom doorway wasn’t. What are you going to do? Pose as a delivery guy? I bet I could find a better way in.”

Trent nodded to an unknown biker across the street in colorful racing spandex. He was at least five inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than Trent. “I’ve got a way,” he said cagily.

“What the hell is it!” Jenks almost exploded, and Trent winced as his words seemed to go right through his head. “God, Trent, I’m trying to help you, and you act as if I’m looking to screw you over. How about a little trust!”

He trusted people. He trusted quite a few, and quite a few had “screwed him over” as Jenks put it. The difference was that when people betrayed him, sometimes other people died. And then other people thought it was his fault. He was tired of it. Everything he had was at risk for the next four hours. Quen said he was not his father, but he was doing the same damning things.
How can a child love a murderer?
The Goddess help him, they had to come out of the closet if only so he could stop killing people.

Frustrated, Trent pulled into a tiny alley. Jenks darted from his shoulder as the bike pivoted in a tight circle to face the opening. His eyes came up to find Jenks waiting, hands on his hips, a frown on his face . . . and hope in his eyes as he hovered. It was the last that did it, and Trent took a deep breath. It was almost harder to trust Rachel’s partners than it was to trust her.

“Well?” Jenks prompted as three bikers whizzed by the mouth of the alley.

Propping the bike against a wall, Trent removed the saddlebag, setting the box with his equipment aside before throwing the empty bag into a Dumpster. “There’s a bike race at Pike Place Market,” Trent said, and Jenks waved a hand in a tiny circle as if to say get on with it. “The course runs to within half a mile of the Withons’ front door, a quarter mile off from a secondary entrance that will be lightly guarded, if at all.”

Wings humming, Jenks watched Trent tear open the box and stuff its contents in his belt pack. There wasn’t much: a short utility knife, two hundred yards of thin prototype cord with a fastener clip, harness, baby sling, collapsed float, tire repair kit, wad of explosive gum and fuse wire, a pen flashlight, lighter, and a handful of elven sleep charms. Earth magic wasn’t reliable this close to the ocean, but bringing the charms had seemed prudent even if it took several to work.

“They’ll be watching the race,” Jenks said, hovering with his feet inches over the emptying box, and Trent nodded.

“I expect the Withons will have a few men in it, as do I.” A flash of easily repressed anxiety passed through him as he looked at his wad of money, then the unexpected two-way radio. Grimacing, he threw the money away.
Now it fit
. “A quarter mile off the course there’s a secondary entrance to the Withons’ house—an escape tunnel used by monks. The Withon estate is a converted monastery on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean.”

Jenks’s dust shifted from gold to red. “No shit!”

Trent smiled, shocked at how much it lightened his mood. Maybe this was how Rachel survived being someone she didn’t want to be. “No shit. I think Mr. Withon has delusions of being the Count of Monte Cristo. They know about the tunnel, but it will likely have the lightest guard and is the best way in. It starts in a cliff and ends in the main kitchen.

Jenks nodded in thought, his dragonfly-like wings dusting heavily. “That gets us in. How do we get out with a three-month-old? They make a lot of noise, you know. And you can’t stuff them in your coat and run, though that’s probably what Rachel would do.”

Again smiling, Trent flicked a look past the mouth of the alley to a rider skimming past, looking as sleek and athletic as one of his thoroughbreds, one hand on the handlebars and halfway turned to look behind him. “I need a west-facing window,” he said. A west-facing window within a narrow parameter of time, but no need to tell Jenks that. Either he would make it, or he wouldn’t.

Snorting, Jenks landed on the handlebars, turning sideways to look at himself in the tiny rearview mirror and shift his sword. “I didn’t know elves had wings. You gonna fly out?”

Silent, Trent tossed the empty box into the trash and got on the bike. “I’m more worried about finding the nursery without . . . alerting anyone,” he said, catching himself before voicing his real fear. He wasn’t afraid to kill—he was afraid that it was becoming too easy. “They know I’m coming. There will be guards.” Frowning, he pushed the bike into motion, and he rolled smoothly back into the street.
What if they had a decoy?