“They stopped by to make sure Sophia was okay.”
Of course they did. He wouldn’t hear a damned thing about the whole episode from the elves until Samhain was fully in their rearview mirror, but the wolves? Axlam was injured, for goodness sake, and yet she and her boy showed up to check on his family.
Though after seeing Frank Victorsson and his mysterious girlfriend at Magnus Freyrsson’s place, Ed suspected the elves had one of their elf things going on.
Ed knew enough about Norse mythology to have a not-so-good feeling about the number and level of “elf things” happening lately.
Yet another good reason to pack up his family and move down to the suburbs.
Or maybe back to Texas. Houston had good schools, apart from the Texas need to edit history to their white advantage. The University of Minnesota was a damned fine school though, and resident tuition was a lot cheaper, and they only had five years before that whole expense clicked on. And the elves had promised to help pay for all five of his kids.
He’d also have to talk to the elves about that number, too.
He rubbed the hamburger-like scar on his neck. He needed to remember that this place was safer for him and safer for his family than any place in Texas, Houston included.
Ed looked out over the trees and snow. Ten years in Alfheim County, Minnesota, nine-and-a-half of those as Sheriff, and he still found the elves as annoying as he found the tourists.
His radio clicked. “Sheriff Martinez?” Tracy at dispatch said.
“Got a call,” Ed said to Gabe.
“All right, Papa. Bye.” His son hung up.
Ed pressed the button on his mic and leaned his head toward his shoulder. “Go ahead,” he said.
“So,” she said in her thick Northern Minnesota accent no one here admitted to having, “looks like the State Patrol’s needing backup up in the Paul Bunyan State Forest. They’re tied up with that last accident on 34 and are about half-an-hour out.”
Ed settled into his cruiser. Why were they calling him? Alfheim County only contained the southern tip of the park. “No one from Hubbard available?” Hubbard County contained the rest of the territory.
“Well, yes, but…” She paused. “State Patrol’s responding but you’re closer and it’s a guy in a… kilt… and a woman dressed all in black, sir.” Tracy’s husband was a werewolf, so she was keyed into the local magic.
Kilt? The pauses meant she suspected they were dealing with a Scottish magical. Most likely a fae, and probably not a nice one, either.
“The woman’s got a sword.” Tracy paused again. “It’s, ah, large, sir.”
And here he thought he would be able to go home and have himself a nice meal of tasty homemade Somali baked chicken.
Guess not, he thought.
“I’m on my way,” he said as he turned his cruiser north toward the Paul Bunyan State Forest.
Chapter 11
Paul Bunyan State Forest…
Movement across the veil into the mundane world hurt. The Heartway, because it was scaled-up and homogenized and she was a witch, demanded a token.
Sometimes the Heartway demanded more than the value of the token she paid for in coin. Sometimes it demanded user fees rendered in distilled pain.
Some fees came as a sharp stabbing pain in her lower back. Sometimes the process wanted actual blood. Once, when she hadn’t had enough for a full fare, the Heartway had ripped open her flashbacks as payment. She’d ended up sitting on the steps of a small church outside Dublin weeping quietly under a midnight Irish moon.
All because she was not fae. All because witchdom was an affront to the natural order of things and all those who carried magic in a resisting mundane body had to spark and overheat and lose their minds.
Because if you sparked, you had to pay in extra pain.
But this time her movement wasn’t via the Heartway. This time Robin had flung her through a portal of his own making.
So her one and only token would not be accepted. All pain must be handed over on demand.
And all her pain came back to Victor Frankenstein in one way or another.
The moments inside a veil between realms were as endless as they were instant. Entire lifetimes happened in a crossing, birthing into the veil, running their course to your last breath as you pushed on through to the other side. Lives felt as cold shivers up a spine in the middle of the night, or the ghostly touches felt when breathing spring air, or the savory roasting of fall meats.
They happened, yet they didn’t, and every single one of Wrenn’s crossings grazed the life of Victor Frankenstein.
There’d been goodness there, once. A love for a mother who doted and who served as the needed scaffolding to hold together Victor’s distracted and consumed mind. A scaffolding he genuinely required because his was not a mind that held itself holistically to any project, no matter how he waxed poetic about the sublime, or nature, or his supposedly deep understanding of life and death. Victor would find himself consumed with a task, focused only on it, to the detriment of his health and the health of all those around him. And when his mother died, that compassionate structure crumbled, so he turned to the only other structure available to him at that time: his titles and wealth.
A great person once said that with great power came great responsibility, and Victor Frankenstein was not a man who did well with any responsibility, great or small.
By the time he’d kidnapped Wrenn—and she was sure he’d kidnapped her, no matter how he claimed he’d been saving her from worse circumstances—he’d sunk so low into his own misery that he thought it perfectly acceptable to destroy her memories of her previous life. He’d resuscitated her, he’d said, because there was a fiend out there who demanded nothing less than a perfect bride. A terrifying fiend, one so horrid and horrible that Victor couldn’t—no, wouldn’t—allow him anywhere near Wrenn.
But it was her job to remember that she’d
