Ed pushed by Wrenn. “You are being played,” he said. Fae always played. “Stay away from my kids!” he roared. The elves were enough. He didn’t need his own fae problem.
A whooping roar echoed between the walls.
A helicopter.
No lights were visible in the sky, and with the trees muffling and distorting sound, Ed had no way to tell where the copter was. It wasn’t nearby, that was for sure. “That sounded about a mile away,” he said.
Wrenn climbed up into a hollow in the old mission’s walls. She tested the adobe on either side, chose the west side, and jumped for the broken top of the wall.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She hung from the side of the wall, now a good seven feet off the ground, and hand-over-handed her way toward the taller, sturdier corner of the old building. “I might be able to see Ranger’s magic from up here.”
Or that damned sword. “I think it came from the east.” Which meant the coast.
Wrenn’s hand slipped. Pebbles dropped to the dirt. She kicked her foot into the adobe as if she were digging into a cupcake.
“Careful,” Ed said.
“Yes, Dad,” she responded as she pulled herself up to the top of the broken adobe wall.
Wrenn crouched a good fifteen feet up on the old mission’s corner like some black clad superhero. She gripped the wall with one hand and shielded her eyes from the starlight with the other.
The copter’s engine shutting down echoed through the area.
“There!” She pointed due east, toward the coast, as he suspected. “Lights. Magic, too.”
Ed hopped up on the hollow and did his best to see over the trees. There was definitely a glow that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“There’s a helicopter!” Wrenn jumped the full fifteen feet down from the wall. She landed, skipped, and rolled like some parkour jumper who knew exactly what they were doing. “Try to keep up, lawman,” she said, and darted into the trees.
She’d outstrip him with her longer legs even if he kept pace. “I’m the one with the gun!” he called.
She didn’t even look back.
He’d pissed her off with his comments about Frank and Victor Frankenstein. Here he was in the scrub brush in a South Texas wildlife reserve with a fae version of Frank Victorsson—because she was Frank’s sister, no matter how much she wanted to argue about it—and he’d made her mad enough that she’d left him behind.
Chapter 23
Gabe Martinez wasn’t sure when the kelpie turned into a stallion. He wasn’t sure how he or Sophie got onto his back, either, or how the sword had gotten all tangled up with the leather and rings of the kelpie’s bridle.
Ranger had touched the sword and a wave had blasted off it like a big thick-walled bubble. Then they were moving, even though they weren’t—like Ranger and the sword had loaded the van, and the floor, and the garage door, and the snowblower all on a flatbed truck like the ones they use to film actors driving cars. It was all fake. Moving, yet not, and someone else was in control.
It wasn’t Ranger, either. Or the sword. Then Gabe blinked and they weren’t in the van anymore. They were on Ranger’s back galloping toward the coast and the beach and the sand.
Sophia held tight to Gabe’s waist. She buried her face in his t-shirt and mumbled things he couldn’t hear. The sword glowed in real, visible light. Gabe coiled Ranger’s mane around his hands and held on with all his strength, and prayed his sister would do the same.
He’d promised Momma he’d keep her safe.
Ranger dropped into a trot and picked his way down the grass-covered slopes to the sands of a beach. The moon shimmered just above the horizon and cast a long trail of silver over the ocean. Waves lapped on the beach. Something howled in the distance. And two bubbles of town light glowed not too far away—the closer of the two to the north and the larger, more distant, glow to the south.
Gabe had no idea where they were other than on a beach someplace a lot warmer than Minnesota. It could be California, or Florida, or somewhere in South America, for all he knew. But he didn’t think so.
“South Texas,” Sophia said.
They were on the Gulf Coast. The glow to the north was probably South Padre Island.
“The ocean stinks,” Sophia said.
The Gulf of Mexico smelled pretty much the same as the California beaches—sandy and sour and like water you should never drink. Some people liked the smell, but Gabe found it gross. Lake Superior smelled big and full of living things, too, except Lake Superior didn’t smell like someone had left a salted dead turtle to rot in the sun.
Maybe the stink wasn’t the water. Maybe it was the kelpie.
“Ranger smells like a dead seahorse,” Sophie said.
Between the s at the start of “seahorse” and the s at the end, they dropped from the back of a huge stallion onto their butts in the sand.
Ranger, now back in his black kilt and with the sword in his hand, stood over them. “I smell like my loch, missy,” he drawled. “Love ye too, by the bye.” He squatted and peered at both of them as if to check that they were still pristine and tasty for the vampires. “Either o’ ye move an inch an’ I’ll slice you up, aye?”
Sophia leaned toward him. “Tell the truth, Ranger,” she said.
He sighed and rubbed at his face with his free hand. Then he looked over his shoulder at the glow that had to be South Padre Island. “Th’ vampires will be here soon.” He nodded toward the brush in the direction they’d ridden in from. “They watch for activity at tha’ Heartway gate. They ken somethin’ yummy’s come through for their wee appetites.” He frowned. “Children are a delicacy, it seems. ‘Nother reason they like bein’ this close t’ the border.”
