Into the Woods (48 page)

Annoyance flashed through Trent. Sensing it, Jenks slowed and his wing hum dropped in pitch. Trent stopped, wanting to explain but lacking the words. Jenks wasn’t a babysitter, which was the feeling Trent always had gotten from Quen. He’d proven to be an admirable help, dependable, resourceful, and best of all, not trying to change his plan but work within it. He was stupendous at his job, and it was obvious why Rachel put her trust in the pixy before anyone else.

But trust came hard to him as well, and old guards fall slowly. Continuing to withhold information from Jenks in order to preserve a feeling of independence wasn’t only useless, but made him look bad. Shoulders slumping, he dropped his head. Jenks was waiting for him when he looked up.

“You’re right,” he said, and Jenks’s dust flashed. “Ley line magic is going to hurt, but I can invoke the doppelgänger charm and possibly manage a burst of defensive magic in a pinch. Making a protective circle is out, seeing as my connection will be flimsy at best.”

His dust sifting down brightening, Jenks nodded, his lack of a smart-ass comment clearly stating that he knew something had changed—and that he appreciated it. “Ten feet ahead is a wooden door with a narrow airhole to feed the fire with,” Jenks said, his voice stronger somehow. “There’s no lock. Once you’re through, you’ve got a three-by-three shaft with a ladder older than my grandmum’s underwear which leads to a tiny space behind the fireplace. You go through a slit, and you’re
in
the fireplace. It’s going, by the way. Big-ass fire made out of maple and oak. Are your tights fire retardant?”

Trent winced. “To a certain point,” he said hesitantly, and Jenks smirked.

“I’ll dust the fire down for you,” he offered, and again Trent was ashamed at how he had been thinking of Jenks as a tool, not an equal member. “They probably think the fire is enough of a guard since the kitchen is empty. There’s lots of people passing in the hall.” He hesitated as Trent adjusted his cap. “We’re still good to go, right?”

Adrenaline zinged through him, and he thought of his promise, vowing to see it through. Then he thought of his private jet waiting on the tarmac. He wanted this to be over and he and Lucy on it in the worst way. “Yes. Thank you for the layout. It’s far better than what I had.”

Jenks’s wings hit a higher pitch, and he darted toward the door like a glowing hummingbird. Trent followed, waving his dust aside and taking care not to disturb the tiny chunks of plaster since they were deep within the fortress and who knew what the Withons had listening. The escape tunnel was extremely clever. If it needed to be used, it’d be an easy matter to slip past a banked fire, then build the fire high to disguise the opening. By the time the fire had died down and someone thought to even look for the escape tunnel, the fleeing monks would be miles away. That’s not how they would be escaping, though.

The glow of Jenks’s light dipped once and then held steady, and Trent winced as the tiny door materialized in his glow: three feet tall and two wide, with an elaborately carved latticework to allow for the passage of air. Jenks was sitting on the lintel and dangling his legs, his falling dust being pulled through the airholes. Crouching before it, Trent touched the wood to find it was warm. The fireplace was indeed in use.

“The latch is a lever on top of the frame,” Jenks said, rising up to show him. “It’s stuck, but you could probably get it.”

Trent’s fingers searched, and his eyes met Jenks’s when he felt the smooth warmth of iron snuggled into the door frame. If you didn’t know it was there, it would have been impossible to find. Together they smiled, and the adrenaline thumped through him in time with his heart. His thoughts darted back to his promise. Maybe he could do this without leaving death behind him. Maybe with a pixy’s help he could do what needed to be done, and not kill anyone.

“Give me a sec to see if there’s anyone in the kitchen,” Jenks said as he took to the air. “The fire is going to flair when you open the door.” It went dark as he darted through the latticework, and Trent nodded, even though the pixy was gone. Almost immediately he was back, giving him a glowing thumbs-up through the latticework.

Exhaling his tension, Trent worked the latch and slipped through. An unexpected billow of smoke eddied down the shaft, quickly dissipating as the natural flow of air was reestablished when he shut the door. Eyes smarting, he stood in the narrow shaft, looking up at the soft glow of firelight and the sound and smell of burning wood.

“Hurry, before anyone comes back!” Jenks prompted from the top of the ladder, and Trent tentatively put his weight on the lowest rung. The oak felt old, but it was the rope holding it together that he was concerned about; holding his breath, he edged himself upward, trying not to shake or stress the bindings more than he had to.

The heat grew with ever step. He was sweating by the time he reached the top and clambered into a narrow four-by-two room, solid rock on all sides, ceiling, and floor—except for the narrow one-foot slit that led to the back of the fireplace. An orange glow of heat poured through it, and Trent tried to breathe shallowly as Jenks sat on the top rung of the ladder and basked.

“I got this,” he said as his wings hummed into invisibility and he lazed into the air. “I’ll shout when it’s safe. Don’t dawdle. It doesn’t last long.”

Dawdle?
Trent thought, pulling his hand back from the wall when he touched it and found it hot. He liked the warmth, but this was like a sauna turned death trap.

The orange glow on the walls dimmed, and he moved to the slit, shoulders stiffening. “Now!” Jenks’s voice came faintly.

“God help me, I’m trusting a pixy with my life,” he whispered, then plunged through, his back scraping. He stopped, shocked as he ran into the heat as if it was a wall. No wonder they hadn’t put a guard here. His toes were almost
in
the fire, the firebox not as large as the one in his great room, but large enough to put his desk into—and seemingly every inch of it was near the ignition point. The coals glowed dully, and the blackened wood smoldered under Jenks’s dust. On the far side of him, flames flickered still. Beyond the hearth was an industrial-looking kitchen with several cooking stations, bright lights, stone walls, and very high ceilings with ventilation slits among the waist-thick support beams.

“Move your lily white elf ass!” Jenks shouted from the nearest stainless steel counter, and Trent jolted into motion.

Hair lifting from the draft, Trent lurched over the chunks of smoldering wood, smelling his shoes start to melt. Grimacing, he leaped out of the firebox, landing on the raised hearth made of natural stone. Behind him, the fire whooshed upward, Jenks’s dust spent.

“Jenks, that is as impressive as anything I’ve ever seen,” he whispered, dumbfounded and grateful as he watched the three-foot-high flames, feeling as if he had been baptized by fire. But then both his and Jenks’s heads came up at the noise in the hall—military steps and a woman’s voice raised in complaint.

“Crap on toast,” he muttered, then blinked, wondering when—on the coast-to-coast excursion he’d been on with Rachel—that he’d picked that up.

“Let’s go, cookie maker,” Jenks shrilled, but leaning against the counter, Trent pulled his melted shoes off and tossed them back into the fire. “Come on!” the pixy shouted, and Trent ran a hand over his ash prints on the hearth, then wildly looked for something to hide behind. There was nothing, and plucking a pan that had to weigh at least fifteen pounds from a rack, he made a dash for the only door to the place, his sock feet slipping on the smooth slate.

“No, here!” Jenks exclaimed as he hovered before an industrial-looking freezer door.

Trent skidded to a stop. “You’re kidding.”

“It’s a pantry!” Jenks said, hovering as he made a “get-in” gesture. “A root cellar. Come on! I wouldn’t make you hide in a Tink’s frozen titties freezer.”

He ran, bringing the pan with him. Heart pounding, he yanked the locking pin out and slipped inside, not looking in the tiny, thick window first. Breathless, he eased the door shut as the voices became loud. Jenks hummed in satisfaction as Trent leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, relishing the cool damp of the clearly temperature controlled room. Damn, that had been close.

“Sorry, I should have told you about the pantry earlier,” Jenks said, hovering so that just his head was showing through the window, in effect, an invisible watcher.

“You think?” Trent said sarcastically. How Rachel did this for a living was beyond him. To be honest, though, she didn’t break into millionaires’ estates very often—unless you counted the times she’d broken into his.

The smell of mushrooms pulled his eyes open, and as the woman’s muffled voice complained of the elaborate precautions this last week, he looked over the racks of roots and tubers, baskets of apples, and bottles of wine—and row upon row of jars of organic baby food.

Trent looked at his watch, panicking. He’d planned to get her at her late-morning feeding, and now he was standing in the very place that they were going to be coming into!

“She’s not old enough for creamed peas yet,” Jenks said dryly, not turning from his spying at the window. “Chillax, dude. I wouldn’t point you to a bad hiding spot.”

Chillax?
Trent thought as his emotion soured into disgust, not liking that the pixy could read him so well.
Had he told him to chillax?

“We got three people in the kitchen,” he said, then waved Trent off with a rude clattering noise when he leaned to the window to see. “You can hear the woman. She’s about Rachel’s age, I think. You all look alike to me unless you have wrinkles. Man, that girl doesn’t stop complaining. She looks athletic, though. Definitely not your average nanny. She’ll take you out if the other two don’t. Guns, uniforms, attitudes.” Jenks looked at him, grinning. “Should be fun.”

The knot in his gut eased, then tightened right back up. It had been a miracle to have gotten here in time. It would take another to find Lucy and escape.
Twenty minutes
, he thought, glancing at his watch. It would be over in twenty minutes.
Give me the strength to succeed, and I will die trying to be the man my father wasn’t
. It was frightening because he believed it. He had to.

“Okay, we’re down to one guard,” Jenks said, still hovering at the window, gazing out as if it was TV. “The big guy went back into the hall. I think the woman told him to leave. Dude, that is one bitchy nanny.”

Trent fingered his doppelgänger charm, tucking it into the sleeve of his biking suit for quick retrieval. He had to have more control, less anger. More control led to less damage, less need to kill anyone. The pantry had a lock. Once he knocked the guard out, he could shove him in here and be done with it. The woman would go down under the sleep charms. He only needed ten minutes to finish this, a lifetime in the art of child abduction.

Taking a breath, Trent reached for the handle.

“What do you need for your glamour?” Jenks said as he turned, still hovering before the window. “Hair? Rachel always needs hair.”

Lips parting, Trent hesitated. “Ah, yes,” he stammered, then glanced through the window to see the woman with her back to him, warming up a bottle on the stove. “I was going to get it when I down the man.”

Jenks’s dust turned gold, and the pixy raised one eyebrow, his head cocked and his hands on his hips. “And then what? Convince the woman you knocking him out was a bad dream? Wait here. I can get you a hair.”

Trent carefully opened the door a crack, and Jenks slipped out, immediately darting up to the tall ceiling.

“—driving me batty,” the woman was saying, the pitch of her voice making her in her late twenties and having a brain in her head. She was indeed athletic looking as she stood before the industrial stove with her hands on her hips and watched the thermometer, appearing as if she would know as many ways as Quen to take out someone. “Dust the lightbulbs, Megan,” she said in a nasally falsetto. “I can smell the dust burning. Adjust the temperature of the room, will you, Megan? The baby feels warm. Megan, fetch my laptop. I need to check my portfolio and see if I have enough to buy that island I’ve been wanting.” The woman snorted, cranking the gas higher until it nearly ran up the sides of the warming pot. “I am
not
her personal slave. I am
a nanny
, and she needs to leave me the
fuck alone
!”

Trent bit his lip, trying not to laugh as the man with her was. He had overheard similar complaints from his staff until Ellasbeth had had enough and left—taking his unborn child with him.

His smile faded, and he turned his attention to the guard as Jenks dropped straight down and plucked a hair from his shoulder, continuing to fall to the floor where he skimmed above the slate and under the open, stainless steel counters on wheels. The man never even heard him.

Trent’s heart beat twice, and Jenks slid into the pantry before a silver-lined streak of dust.

“You’d better hurry,” the pixy said, his eyes bright and eager as he dropped the hair into Trent’s waiting grasp. “That milk is almost at the right temp.”

Trent flicked the tiny vial of prepared charm open with his thumb, the soft pop of the plastic making him jump. Carefully he angled the short black hair into it, resealed the vial, and shook it.

“You’re not going to drink that, are you?” Jenks said as he landed on a jar of mashed sweet potato, his wings stilling as he gave Trent a dubious look.

“No, thank God.” Touching his hat for reassurance, Trent closed his eyes to mumble the traditional ancient elf plea, then hesitated. Exhaling, he dropped his head, feeling unsure. He had called upon the gods they no longer believed in hundreds of times, but now . . . to do so casually felt . . . risky.
I am here
, he thought simply.
Judge my actions sound
.

Teeth clenched against the expected pain, he tapped the line, wincing. His eyes were still shut, and he heard Jenks take wing. Panting, he finished the incantation that actually made the spell work, the vial tight in his grip. He opened his eyes, finding Jenks watching.