Axlam watched Ed flip through his notebook. “I will make sure you get the full run plan, Ed,” she said. “Our route, who’s running with whom, etc. We’ll start at our house, as usual.”
His cheek twitched. “Thank you,” he said.
She nodded to each of us, then walked toward the front door and the elves inside.
“What kind of dumbass broadcasts intent like this?” Ed tucked his notepad away.
He’d changed the subject. Axlam’s promise of information must be enough for now.
“A dumbass lackey to greater evils,” I said. We had a rich man in town openly looking to cause pain. “He reminds me of my father.”
Ed’s expression softened. I didn’t know anything about his family relations, or his wife’s, but I suspected he’d seen enough father-son interplay to understand the entire spectrum of human possibilities. “He thinks he’s a god?”
When you live with magic, a metaphorical “god’s gift” was very different from a literal one. And whoever was behind this might just have some godly—or god-like—help. “If Axlam is correct, he’s enthralled by a dark magic.”
Echoes of the deck doors opening rolled around the house. Happy kid sounds followed.
Ed nodded toward the house. “No Jaxson, I see.”
“He went with his dad to pick up Uncle Remy,” I responded.
“Ah.” He walked back toward his cruiser. “All of Sophia’s other friends are normal.” He blinked. “Town mundanes.” Then adjusted his hat. “There aren’t a lot of magical kids in the school.”
No, there weren’t. Elven children were rare, and right now, Akeyla was the only little elf in her elementary school. The children of the wolves tended to be mundane or not obviously magical, and they, too weren’t that common.
Ed adjusted his belt again. He pointed west. “I want to check out the properties owned by Natural Living Incorporated, and I’d like to do so with someone who can see what I can’t.”
He could have asked one of the elves, or one of his wolf deputies. But he was here, asking me.
He must have read my expression because he grinned and slapped my arm. “Get what you need. I’d like to be home before dinner.”
I turned toward the garage to clean up. Going out with Ed would give me an excuse to stop in town and see if I could find an end-of-season deal on a replacement bike.
“Whose bike is that?” he asked. “Looks like a Flying Merkel frame. Too bad they painted it. They’re much more valuable in their original orange.”
I glanced back at the bike. I’m too big to ride, and never paid that much attention to brands, motorized or otherwise, but I remembered the name.
Ellie had a refurbished early Twentieth Century bicycle.
Ed pointed at the house. “Make sure you bring that axe of yours.”
“Will do.” Looked as if Sal was about to get her walk in the woods after all, even if it wasn’t to find my mystery woman.
Time to look for the debris left behind by a bad wolf.
Chapter 10
Ed and I hit five different properties along the northern edge of Alfheim County, where the elves’ lands met the federal and state parks. All five were within the normal run territory of the wolves. All five owned by one of the shell corporations Ed had found—and all five were abandoned.
We found nothing. Sal had clearly been annoyed by something at our last stop, but when Ed got called out to an accident on one of the highways, he made me go home. “You can get yourself kidnapped by vampires or evil spirits or demons, but please don’t do it on my watch, okay? We need you,” he’d said.
Sal hadn’t been able to pinpoint her annoyance, and nothing overtly magical had made itself known, so I texted Arne and Dag and came into town with hopes of finding a new bike.
The locals—and the tourists—liked Alfheim’s lack of chain stores. No big box warehouse anything here, just artisans and several blocks’ worth of shops along the city’s downtown shopping district.
I parked in the small lot down the street from the bike shop, shouldered Sal, and walked the block and a half to the storefront. I would not normally take my axe for a stroll along Main Street, but not a lot of tourists were around now that the air had taken on the crisp scent of the approaching winter. Strings of lights decorated several display windows along with the town’s all-out dive into fall, apples, Halloween, and the bounty of Samhain.
A bell tinkled as I ducked through the bike shop’s door. Like most of the shops downtown, its floor space was a meandering maze of cut-throughs linking spaces inside multiple adjacent buildings. Several of the galleries were the same way and made shopping more of an experience than an exchange of funds for goods.
Arne said it added to the charm and ambiance of Alfheim. Mostly, it made finding an employee more difficult than running a search and rescue operation into Superior National Forest.
After five minutes of navigating around a display of snowboards and snow goggles, another of winter clothing, a wall of local art, and a table of locally-made soaps of all things, I found Sif the Golden standing on top of a ladder at the back of one of the shop’s many halls as she stuffed boxes into a dark overhead alcove.
Sif the Golden wasn’t an elder elf, nor was she particularly powerful. She was, though, the only elf in Alfheim who wove her entire magical black ponytail into a rope of smaller ropes of braids, colorful cords, and silver and gold chains. Sif carried an entire jewelry box’s worth of adornment in her hair, and even though she was one of the few elves who glamoured blonde, she rarely hid the extras in her tresses.
“Frank!” she called. “Hello!” Soft twinkling filled the air around her head as she climbed down the ladder, as if
