Stevie Rae curled up in one of the comfy chairs facing me as I sat at my cool desk made of something called zebrawood with glass legs that were really reclaimed windows from an old industrial building that had been gutted for condos in Tulsa’s growing Pearl District. The Skype call was still live, and I smiled at the image of my friend sitting on her carved marble throne in her magnificent castle with a laptop balanced on her lap.
“Your Majesty! It’s great to see your face.” I was relieved to notice that the dark circles under her eyes had lightened.
She smiled. “There is no need for such formality between us, my young friend.”
“But I like calling you that. It reminds me how lucky I am to have a queen who is my friend.”
“Very well, then I shall appreciate the title and enjoy that you call me by it. I wish this call were just to catch up. Sadly, it is not. I got your message that Neferet was broken from her tomb by her mirror version from the Other World.”
I nodded. “We’ve started calling them Batshit—our Neferet—and Other Neferet for the other one. It’s less confusing.”
“And accurate if I’m reading the sprites correctly.”
I sat up straighter. “What’s going on with them?”
“They have changed. Though perhaps it happened slowly over the past year, and I missed the signs because I have been in mourning,” she said.
“Hey, you loved Seoras for five hundred years. Taking a year off to be sad about his death isn’t unreasonable.”
She sighed and ran her hand through her long hair, which I noticed was now all silver-gray with no hint of her copper blaze. “Not unreasonable, perhaps, but irresponsible, though I am not sure what I could have done had I noticed before now.”
“Noticed what?”
“They’ve become uncommunicative. Oak, the sprite who tends to be in a leadership position, is frequently absent, and when I am able to speak with her, she is strangely defensive and not forthcoming with information.”
“I know Oak! She’s the sprite who comes to Kevin, my vampyre brother from the Other World, most. And she was at the stadium in his world when we had the showdown with Other Neferet. Oak is the sprite who bargained for the other elementals and accepted Aphrodite’s humanity, and life, in payment for returning the humanity to their red vampyres.”
“So, she has been busy.”
“Very,” I said.
“Well, I summoned her after I got your message about Nef—I mean Batshit. As you might remember, I do not command the sprites and I rarely invoke Old Magick. My affinity is for this isle—not the fey.”
I nodded. “I remember. It’s like the Isle of Skye is a dam and you have control over how much water is allowed out of it.”
“The analogy isn’t bad, but it’s more like I have my fingers perpetually plugging leaks—and several get past me—but the flood is prevented. So, I asked Oak if she had any knowledge about her escape, and the sprite instantly became defensive. Her answers, all in rhymes, were garbled—confusing. Around her, the other sprites were clearly agitated. I was only able to ascertain that a vampyre from another world—Other Neferet—instigated the release. It was clear that Oak played a part in it, but beyond giving me the general sense that she’d been the vehicle through which Other Neferet entered your world, I couldn’t get more out of her.”
“What we found supports what you’re saying. We felt the residue of Old Magick at Woodward Park, but it wasn’t around the tomb. It seemed to be the leftover power that it took for Other Neferet and a human traveling with her to return to the Other World.”
“Your Neferet is going to follow her. That was the only other information I could piece together from Oak.”
“Is Oak going to open the portal for her?” I asked.
“I did not get that impression, but I did get a notion of something that was more disturbing. Oak feels sympathetic to the Neferets. I think that’s why she resisted giving me information. This is highly unusual, Zoey. Sprites do not take sides in the affairs of mortals. Sometimes they will do tasks for them, as you have seen, but always for a price.”
I added, “And the price gets higher with each task.”
“Not always higher, but their payment usually must amuse or intrigue the sprites—and they have been alive since the worlds were formed and then populated with gods. They aren’t easy to amuse, especially after they’ve been called a few times. The biggest danger with using Old Magick is the side effect that I’ve already warned you about. Unless the Goddess has gifted you with the ability to wield it—Old Magick always changes its user.”
A sudden thought came to me. “Is that change always negative? And, don’t worry, I’m not asking for myself. I’ve already felt what you’re talking about and I know for sure in my case, the change would be bad, which also means if my brother kept using it, the change would be bad for him too, since we’re super alike. I’m just wondering …” I didn’t want to say it aloud because it sounded crazy inside my head, but Other Neferet had been using Old Magick, and she’d also fled Batshit and was hanging out with a human who she actually seemed to care about. Could she possibly be—
Sgiach interrupted my musing. “As the nature of Old Magick is neither positive nor negative, my guess is that it could, indeed, affect its user in a positive manner. But there is no predicting it.”
“Interesting,” I said. “So, did Oak give you any idea of when Batshit is going over there? Right now, we’re pretty sure she’s hiding in Midtown somewhere, eating people. Well, she’s for sure eating people. It’s where she’s hiding that we’re not a hundred percent about.”
“No. Oak only came to me because I am Queen of Skye, but I could not command
