Into the Woods (44 page)

“I can help with the guards.”

Jenks was flying beside him, easily keeping up as they followed a pair of riders to the start of the bike race. When Trent said nothing, the pixy’s dust shifted to a mustard yellow. “I can!” he said belligerently. “I can kill people your size if they aren’t using magic. I could kill you, with half a day to plan it.”

“Okay.”

It might not have been the right thing to say, but Trent didn’t care if he insulted him. He’d only accepted his help to shut him up and maybe get Rachel to trust him a little. But instead of bristling in anger, the pixy snorted, his dust a bright silver stream behind him. “Your disbelief amuses me,” Jenks said dryly. “But if you keep ignoring me, I’m going to stab you in your ear. Nothing permanent, but you’ll lose some hearing from the scar tissue.”

Pulse fast from his exertions, Trent chuckled, only to find Jenks laughing with him. This might not be so bad if the pixy understood his dry sense of humor. “I have a boat to pick us up, but it has a narrow window,” he said, leaning as he took a wide curve.

Jenks’s wings shifted pitch as he kept up. “You’re going down on that fish line you stuffed in your pack?” he said, his disbelief obvious. Trent could understand why. It didn’t look like it could support a cat, much less him and a . . . baby. The Goddess help him, what was he going to do with a baby? He hadn’t planned on raising a child this soon, and certainly not alone, but now that he had one, he wanted to do it right.

The way suddenly opened up into a wide courtyard of people, bullhorns, colored banners, and flags. Damping an unexpected surge of alarm, Trent slowed. “Well?” he said as they cruised into the starting area. “Is there anything you can add to my plan?”

Jenks landed on his shoulder, surprising him. “Trent, I’ve decided I’m going to help you get your kid,” he said, and Trent blinked, the bike continuing forward on momentum. “Not just so you can help Rachel, but for you. Getting your kid back is important.”

“Thank you,” he whispered, wondering what it meant to have the unconditional support of a pixy.

“I’ll let you know if something strikes me,” Jenks said casually. Trent stifled a shiver when the pixy’s fitfully moving wings tickled the side of his neck. “Stealing babies,” the pixy said with a laugh. “I can’t wait to tell Rachel.”

Rachel.
What was she going to say when he walked in with a baby? he wondered as he found a curb and brought the bike to a rest among the milling throng of bikes. Laugh at him? Tell him he should have kept his weasel in its cage? True, Lucy hadn’t been expected, but now that she existed, he wanted to be a part of her life, not just because of who she was going to become, but because of a nameless feeling pulling him across the city.

He had a daughter, and his daughter needed him.

TWO

T
rent breathed in and out in time with his pedaling, the ache in his chest beginning to hurt more than his legs as he held his head down and drafted off the bike ahead of him.
My God, would the Weres ever shut up?
he thought, tilting his head to watch the pack of three men and one woman, clearly a team from a local radio station by the looks of their colorful spandex and logo-plastered water bottles. They were more than a third of the way into the race, and they hadn’t stopped talking the entire way as they pushed through the peloton and left most of the riders behind, their natural endurance putting them ahead of all but the most conditioned humans.

He had joined them early because anyone talking so much couldn’t be planning an attack, and he’d stuck with them because they were going faster than most everyone else. Now, after an hour of their chatter of killer hills, salt blocks, carbing up, and butt butter, he was wishing he’d found someone else.

The road before him snaked around a wide turn as it began another slow rise up, and after a quick glance at his handlebar-mounted GPS, he wondered if he should start dropping back to put distance between him and the radio team before he slipped off the marked route and into the national forest they were biking through.

He glanced behind him; there was no one visible between him and the last curve, almost a half mile back. Head lifting, he began to slow, watching the last biker pull away, talking, still talking. Weres were undoubtedly the chattiest of all Inderlanders, their mouths going nonstop whenever they did anything even remotely physical. One of his best horse whisperers had been a Were, and the woman had never shut up, not even in bed.

Slowly the Weres pulled ahead as the sun-dappled road wound along the top of a ridge overlooking the sound. To the left, the land fell away quickly to the surf. To the right, scrubby trees and brush of the forest made a slow incline up. The five-foot-wide path was paved, clearly made for bike travel, and his thin street tires hummed under him. He’d been cruising at a good speed, but after an hour, the pace was starting to tell.
Save some energy for later
, he mused, backing off even more. What waited for him at the Withon compound was not encouraging.

The sound of Jenks’s wings cut through his worrisome musings, and the pixy landed on the GPS, his dust making the liquid crystal screen blank out. “There are two guys back there being very careful to stay just behind every curve,” he said, his wings flat to his back as the wind pulled at them. “They smell like elves and have that same straw-yellow hair as Ellasbeth. If you drop from the pack now, they’re going to catch you alone. They’ve been taking out everyone who catches up with them. The guy in the blue is popping their tires.”

Frowning, Trent tucked his chin to lessen the wind. Magic users. No surprise there. “How long until we reach the turnoff?” he asked, looking up to see that the team of Weres wasn’t as far ahead of him as he had thought they’d be.

Jenks looked down at the GPS, head cocked when he realized his dust blanked the screen. “Ah, about a half mile. The turnoff is at the bottom of the next hill. It runs through a patch of thistles, so watch it.”

The thistles hadn’t been on his intel, and grateful, he silently thanked Rachel for insisting he include Jenks. He had thought it had been unusual that no one had caught up to them—Ellasbeth’s men conveniently eliminating witnesses. His agreement with the Withon family concerning the theft of Lucy was not necessarily legal, but it was binding.

“Thank you,” he whispered, knowing Jenks heard him when his dust shifted color. “I’d rather take them out in the woods than on the road.” Standing up on his pedals, Trent started to power up the hill, his legs protesting until they rallied to the demand. Jenks darted off, and the GPS/MPH indicator gave a hiccup and returned to life. Swinging to the left, Trent began overtaking the complaining Weres. They’d likely shave minutes off their time if they’d quit talking.

“You want me to take them out before you get to the turnoff?” Jenks asked, his dust streaming out behind him as he easily kept up, and Trent eyed him.

“Can you?” he said, starting to breathe hard.

Jenks shrugged, and the Were they were currently passing almost fell off his bike, staring at the pixy. “Not if they’re magic users, but I can slow them down to give you a few more seconds to get on the turnoff.”

Trent nodded, not speaking as they passed another Were. “Don’t endanger yourself more than what’s prudent,” he wheezed. One more Were to go, and then he’d be free of them.

A burst of gold dust sifted from the pixy, lost in the cool breeze rising up from the ocean. “Check!” he said cheerfully. He hesitated a moment as if he was going to say something more, then shifted direction and was gone.

Still standing on the pedals, Trent forced himself up the hill, his legs protesting and his chest on fire. The last Were fell behind him when she halted at the top of the hill, stopping to look back down the hill and shout encouraging words to her teammates. Ellasbeth’s house/castle/monastery was visible in the ocean mist ahead of him as he rounded the curve and started down. It looked cold even from this distance, the edifice jutting out past the trees and bracken. There was ocean between him and it, the road falling down and to the right before it rose and swung high again to pass within a stone’s throw of the front gate. It was here, though, where he’d break from the race.

The wind buffeted him as he took the curving road into the shade, his hammering pulse easing. Ellasbeth’s home held his attention. It still looked like a monastery, one that had not sheltered happy monks growing vegetables and glorying God, but rather those bitterly hiding from the world. It was forbidding, so close to the sea that earth magic would not be a sure thing, and so near a fault line that ley line magic would be difficult unless having grown up among the fractured feel of the lines here. He couldn’t help but think he was rescuing his daughter, imprisoned in a castle, shut off from the world but for what her caretakers thought was appropriate.

The hum of the tires buzzed up into him, and in an instant, the heat of the sun vanished as he cruised under the shade of the trees, eclipsing his view of the monastery. At the bottom was a patch of thistle. A walking path bisected it, the left-hand way going down the cliff to the rocky beach, the right rising up into the primeval forest. Trent glanced at his GPS. This had to be it.

Downshifting and braking hard, he came to a halt.

The sound of the wind stopped, and his face warmed even as he shivered in the shade of ancient trees. He glanced back, seeing no one on the road, but the top of the hill was hidden behind a curve. Sweat broke out on him. Legs protesting, Trent swung a foot over, and hoisting his sixteen-pound racing bike onto a shoulder, he strode to the right, trying not to disturb the thistles as he found the narrow dirt path.

A faint shout brought his head up. Deep under the trees, he looked back to see a lone rider speeding down the hill; behind him, the three Weres were shouting curses and howling at him. The sun caught a haze of dust, and he smiled and faded back into the woods. One rider now, not two. He could see why Rachel relied on the pixy.

Pulse hammering, he pulled the GPS from the handlebars and tucked it under his armpit as he threw the racing bike into the bracken and out of sight of the path. His helmet was next, his spelling cap now tucked into his pocket. The fronds waved and settled to hide the gleaming black frame. The lone rider knew where he was going, but no need to advertise it. Satisfied, Trent turned and ran down the dirt-packed path. Immediately his legs cramped up, and he grit his teeth, running through it until his clumsy, awkward motion smoothed out into a mile-eating lope he could keep up for hours.

A bird called in the distance, and a woodpecker sounded. His breaths in and out eased as more familiar muscles took over. Running, he could do. The sun came and went on his shoulders, and the sound of the ocean vanished under the hushed sighing of the wind in the trees.

He almost wished he had bowed to Ellasbeth’s demand and abandoned his business dealings in the Midwest if only to claim a chunk of this peace. But then his heart hardened. Cincinnati might not be rich in wild spaces, the forests that once covered her hewn down and burned in the furnaces that had fueled her industrial revolution, the multitude of species she’d once boasted trampled into extinction under her droves of pigs and then people who flocked to the new city and a society built on human values. But for all her loud, brash exuberance, Cincinnati had welcomed his mother and father when they’d fled those who had promised to protect them. Cincinnati offered them shelter, meager, humble, but honest. And his mother, Trent remembered, had loved the fields more than the woods.

An image of his mother sitting in the sun with a horse cropping behind her rose up from his forgotten memories, shocking him. She was laughing with him, a daisy brushing her lips before touching it to his forehead fondly. Trent gasped, stumbling as his feet misplaced themselves. Recovering, he continued on with a panicked pace. He remembered his mother so rarely, and he grasped the image of her smiling at him, the sun blinding on her white dress, the grass as green as her eyes, sealing the memory away so he’d never forget it again. His mother had loved the fields, so far from the sea that she had forgotten its lure.

“Hey, Trent!”

The mental image of his mother vanished at Jenks’s voice. Stifling his annoyance, he squinted up at the pixy. “One left?” he panted as he ran.
My mother was of the field
, he thought, vowing to share his love of horses with Lucy. Girls loved horses. That was one thing they could share. Maybe he could do this.

“Yep,” Jenks said proudly. “One rode right off the cliff swatting at a bug. That would be me. He gashed his leg open on a rock and will be lucky to make it up to the main road and the rescue car. That would be pure dumb luck. The other guy in the blue tights is still on your trail. He took one of the Were’s bikes when I crashed his. You’ve about five minutes ahead. He’s trying to bike in. Stupid ass. You were smart ditching yours. He’s banged his bahoogies twice already.”

Coming to a halt to read the GPS, Trent smacked the mosquito biting his elbow and squinted at the sun-faded map. The system was flashing, having an electronic hissy because he’d gone off the race route, but that the walking trail wasn’t on record was a good thing.
The stream has to be close
. Tucking the GPS away, he squinted up at the cliff rising to his left.

“You going to try to lose him in the woods?” Jenks said as Trent started forward at a slower pace, hoping to catch his breath so he’d have something when push came to shove.

“No. I can’t outrun him. I need a good place for an ambush,” Trent said absently. He looked up, startled to find Jenks hovering backward as he walked forward, staring at him in what appeared to be apprehension. “Ah, thank you, Jenks. I appreciate you taking care of the one man. My chances have improved dramatically.”

Jenks squinted at him, then frowned. “Sure. What can I do to help with this last one? He uses magic like it’s his first language. The broken lines here don’t bother him at all.”

Concerned, Trent felt the bumps in his belt pack. He had only three sleepy-time potions he wanted to keep for the compound. Everything else he had was ley line based and potentially lethal—and with the fractured state of the ley lines this close to the faults, it wouldn’t be a fast implementation. He’d need a distraction if he was to even have a chance. He didn’t want to end up trapping himself in a bubble of protection and lose because he ran out of time, pinned down by one of the Withons’ guards until they came for him and then killed him as a trespasser.
I am so weary of ultimate resolutions . . .