“What does that mean?” she asked. A video like that, one that sort of revealed the little girl’s tall elven ears, could have been a danger to all magicals, not just the elves.
“It means,” Robin ushered her into the antechamber of the large, leaf-lined sanctum where the dryads reported, “that the why in all this is above both our pay grades.”
Very little was above the access that came with the Goodfellow name. “Above our pay grade” did not often apply. She nodded and followed Robin across the shimmering red and green magic gate into the dryads’ sanctum.
Robin held his finger to his lips. One did not speak inside the sanctum. One only listened.
Two quick steps and they stood under the massive stones that made up the henge in which the dryads reported. Each stone had been set into the branch’s wood, and bark had grown up around their bases, holding them in place.
Two intelligence agents in their antlered armor stood in the center. They mirrored each other’s movements, as was their way, and sent their report into the curls of magic flowing through the sanctum like ghosts of an aurora.
The agents told of the elves’ land, and a blizzard. Of how, with elves, the forest and its animals lived protected from the pollution and murder of the mundanes, and how the land understood that soon not even its magicals could stop the coming death and damage.
Wrenn shook her head. Mundanes were destructive to the natural world.
The dryads continued: The land spoke of werewolves and elves and witches gone mad. Of concealments they could not read and of wolves masquerading as genies.
Then they spoke of a vampire.
Wrenn shuddered as if she’d fallen under a frozen lake’s ice.
It’s him, she mouthed to Robin.
Two hundred years out there, probably hiding in caves and feeding on rats, but he’d survived that night in Edinburgh. She now had proof—and evidence that he might still be out there terrorizing the world.
Robin touched his lips again, and leaned his head toward the dryads.
There was another, the dryads reported. A big man who was mundane, yet not. A man who heard the dryads, and saw their magic.
Robin squeezed her hand.
She saw magic. She heard the dryads. And she was mundane, yet not.
This man might have been touched by the same forces Victor had used to make her “viable,” as he’d said, and to bring her witch abilities to the surface. He could, like her, be a victim of Victor’s experiments.
Or he could be something entirely worse. Something that had survived a supposed death on an Arctic ice floe.
The vampire her captor had created was bad enough, but this man—this monster—was why Victor had kidnapped her in the first place. Because he’d wanted a mate.
Wrenn Goodfellow was no monster’s bride.
Robin pulled his phone out of his pocket and tapped on the app he used to call up the non-Heartway gateways, the spots only royalty used, then turned it so she could see.
The closest gate to the elves’ home was some distance north, situated on a trail inside protected land labeled Paul Bunyan State Forest.
Then he quickly closed the app and stuck the phone back into his pocket.
Thank you, she mouthed. Send me now. Please.
Robin frowned.
Residents of Oberon’s Castle were supposed to use the Heartway when traveling into the mundane world. Only so many fae could walk the world at the same time, and Oberon was a stickler for this particular rule.
Even his Second had to follow procedure.
Victor Frankenstein had held her captive. He’d unleashed a demigod of a vampire. And he’d lied about the death of his first mistake—a mistake that might have information about his vampiric brother.
Wrenn Goodfellow turned on her heels. She’d never, not once, made others pay for her pain and existence. The men of Frankenstein did.
“Robin…” she whispered.
One of the dryads shrieked.
Chapter 7
A sparkling orb of light appeared between the dryads.
The dryad on the left tripped as she stepped backward. The one on the right raised her hands to shield her face. A protection spell manifested between the dryads and the orb, but it was too late. The orb exploded outward into a crackling ball of red and green magic.
Someone powerful had interrupted the dryads’ report. Someone with enough power they could pop into the sanctum of Oberon’s spies without even a tickle from the castle’s security spells.
Robin gasped. “What is she doing?”
A feminine hand shot out of the ball of light. Fingers grasped the antlered helmet of the shrieking dryad. And then the dryad’s entire suit of armor and the ball of light vanished with an audible pop.
The two dryads vanished. Up a side branch past the henge, a sprite hooted in shock, then also vanished.
“What just happened?” Wrenn said. Someone—a heavily magical she, from Robin’s response—had literally stolen the armor off a spy’s back.
The wisps of natural green and red magic floating around the henge wiggled and brightened as if someone had attached jumper cables to the sanctum’s giant tree branch.
Robin breathlessly inhaled. “Oh, no,” he said.
All the magic around the henge—where the dryads had been standing, Robin’s natural shimmer of turquoise and leaf greens, the normal aurora-like sheets of extra blue in and amongst the clouds—all of it—stiffened as if someone with a lot of power had yanked it taut.
Two centuries with the fae and this was the first time she’d sensed panic among the inhabitants of Oberon’s Castle. “Who was that, Robin?” Though her instincts tossed out a likely guess.
Her phone buzzed. So did Robin’s.
Every phone buzzed. The whoop of a siren wailed from somewhere nearby.
Robin pulled out his phone. “There’s a breach.”
“In what?” she asked as she pulled out her own phone. “The message says to shelter in place.” Nothing about a breach, or whose magic might have caused it, or what any of it meant.
Robin looked around as if to locate an escape route.
Her instincts said she was about to be called to fight. King Oberon was about to need his paladins. “If there’s a
