He’d left evidence about the fiend—detailed journals of the monster’s stalkings. About little William’s death, and Justine, and his friend Henry. About the Orkney Islands and the death of a wife named Elizabeth.
So there were truths inside Victor’s misery. But they weren’t the most important truth for Wrenn.
Victor had resuscitated her because he thought he could mold a woman without memories into a figure who doted on him and would serve as his missing scaffolding. A woman who loved him. A woman all his own.
The Victor she’d known had fallen down a well of sin and had decided that splashing around in the dark, cold wetness of his soul was all that was left to him, no matter what ropes were thrown to pull him out.
He only wanted to pull her in with him.
And then he built a demon.
Wrenn Goodfellow gasped awake as she dropped out of the veil between Oberon’s realms and into the frigid winter air of the mundane world. All air.
Just air.
She was a good one hundred feet above the ground and dropping fast into a vast stand of fifty- to sixty-foot trees.
The portal had opened over a forest. High up over a forest.
Enough light spread from the setting sun to throw dark shadows, making the forest look thicker than it was and making it difficult to tell if the cedar directly below her was strong enough to usefully break her fall. If she grabbed a limb, or swung the sword…
The emerald magic wrapped around the hilt and her hand pulsed once, and she was sure the sword woke up.
Her legs hit the top of a cedar. She flipped over, now dropping headfirst, and rolled toward the trunk.
Her back hit a bigger branch. A loud crack shook the tree, though thankfully not her bones, even if it did knock her breath from her body. She flipped over again and swung the sword at the next branch.
The blade cut clean through the wood.
The branch snapped downward faster than she fell, slamming against the tree before bouncing down to the ground.
She fell again, but this time she jabbed the sword into the trunk. It sliced all the way through, the tip of the blade visible on the other side, and cut downward for a good five feet before it, and Wrenn, stopped descending.
She was still about seven feet up and hanging from the hilt of a magical Norse sword.
“Thank you,” she whispered to the blade she somehow knew was also a she.
A she named Red.
“What?” Wrenn muttered. “Are you talking to me?” she asked the blade.
No answer. Nothing at all, as if Red had decided to go back to being a simple magical sword. Which she clearly wasn’t. Not with the layer upon layer of magic wrapping her hilt and blade.
What did I steal from the Gallery? Wrenn thought.
No answer.
The golden glow of a northern sunset sparkled off icy rocks and snow. The temperature was most definitely below freezing. And the trees looked North American.
Had Robin tossed her into the Paul Bunyan State Forest near the North American elven enclave? What about Ranger?
Where was that damned kelpie?
Two trees over, hanging over the stout branch of a pine with his well-shaped butt fully exposed to the wind, was the unconscious Ranger.
“Kilts aren’t built for dropping into the north country, now are they?” she snickered.
Now to get herself down before he woke up.
She wrapped her legs around the closest branch. It wasn’t all that sturdy, but if she stayed next to the trunk, she could use it for stabilization until she figured out how to maneuver down to the ground.
The branch creaked but held. Wrenn left Red where she was for the moment, and pulled out her phone.
She held it up.
The phone’s enchanted circuitry folded in on itself as she watched. All her fae-fueled apps vanished from her screens and were now sequestered inside a passcode-protected “game” app. To a mundane person, her phone would look like everyone else’s, and it would take a true magical to sense that it was fae-built.
She held the phone up higher.
And there, a very weak signal from a mundane carrier.
She tapped at the real-world mapping app.
Robin had in fact dropped her into the Paul Bunyan State Forest, but from the looks of it, she was a good three kilometers from a place called Manny’s Backwoods Lodge, the building that housed the actual spy-used local access gate.
She tucked away her phone. She’d have to drag a cold-assed kelpie three kilometers to take him back to Oberon’s Castle.
A roaring buzz bounced through the trees. Three beams of light followed.
Snowmobiles coming in from the east.
Ranger stirred.
Wrenn yanked Red out of the tree. “All right, hon, let’s do this,” she said, and leaned down far enough so she could jab the sword back into the trunk no more than five feet off the ground.
She swung down, one hand on the hilt and the other on the pommel, until she dropped her boots onto the cold ground.
Wrenn pulled Red out and trudged her way through the crispy snow toward Ranger’s tree.
He looked up and shaded his eyes as he peered at the approaching snowmobiles. “No lasses,” he said. “Shame.”
“I’ll cut off your bits if you harm mundanes.” Wrenn swung the sword around.
Ranger laughed. He pressed up on the branch and dismounted as beautifully as an Olympic gymnast. “There’s lakes here, luv.” He sniffed the air. “Sooo mannnyyy lakes.” He shaded his eyes again as he watched the beams of light grow brighter. “If I were ye, I’d be more worried about walkin’ intae elf territory wi’ a stolen blade.” He waved his hand at Red.
If anything, the elves would likely be happy to have it back.
Or not.
Or she might have accidently gotten herself wrapped up in some fae or elf prophecy about swords named Red and inland hurricanes or snownadoes or whatever the local winter hell-weather was.
And she didn’t even have a scabbard.
Ranger ran toward the
