There’d be repercussions if either the elves or the fae showed up in South Padre Island and engaged the vampires in a full-frontal attack.
But then again, Ragnarok was upon them, so as the kids said, you only live once. “Do not call in the fae.” He pulled out his phone. Magnus’s number went to voicemail. “If you can do the whole gate thing, now’s the time,” he said. He hung up and dialed Bjorn and left the same message.
“They’re on their way,” Wrenn said.
She had no idea. None. “How the hell do you know that?” he yelled.
“Because they’re not fae—quiet.” She held up her hand. “Red?”
They hadn’t taken the sword? Ed turned around to look back into the brush, in the direction Wrenn had pointed her ear even though she was looking down so she could concentrate.
He turned, and Ranger punched him in the face.
“I dinnae like ye, mundane,” the kelpie said.
Ed stepped back and swung up the shotgun. “Where are my children?” The son of a bitch had to know.
Ranger also stepped back and swung up the sword. “Ye managed t’ scuttle my chances here an’ ye did it wi’out even bein’ on th’ beach.”
Ed cocked the gun. “Did they take my kids?” Maybe the kids had run into the brush. “Gabe! Sophia!” They needed to stay hidden and away from the kelpie, but Ed needed to know.
Ranger flicked back and forth between pointing the sword at Ed and pointing it at Wrenn. “Clayton’s dead,” he said. “His douchey bodyguard macheted that hat right off his ten-gallon head.” He used his other hand to draw a line over the braided leather and silver around his neck.
“So?” Ed said. Vamp-on-vamp violence wasn’t his problem.
“So?” Ranger chuckled. “Old clan dead. New clan doesnae care.” He shrugged.
Were he and his family free of the vampire threat? Ed aimed the gun. “Where are my kids?” he yelled.
“Queen Titania’s gonnae make an example o’ me,” Ranger said. “If I go back. She might even hand me over t’ the King first, so he can make his own example.”
“Help me take down the entire syndicate and I’ll ask the King to give you leniency,” Wrenn said. She moved closer.
“An’ then I’d be a traitor t’ my kind, a kelpie who helped a woman o’ my own free will.” Ranger slid his foot back as if he were about to run into the brush.
If he dropped into stallion form, they’d never catch him.
“Alfheim will help you,” Ed said. He shouldn’t offer Alfheim’s magical help to anyone or anything. Ever. It wasn’t his place. Or his pay grade. “They helped Tony and Ivan for seventy years until they turned on the elves.” And they would have stayed helped, if Frank’s brother hadn’t come around.
“Nae thanks, lawman. I’d rather not trade th’ Queen’s golden cage for one lined wi’ elven silver.”
Ed lowered the shotgun. It always came back to cages, didn’t it? His. The kids’. The elves’, for goodness sake, that one huge cage where they were trapped by the ways of their mundanes because that’s how magic worked. They were as naively insular and stoic as the local Nordic Americans, because for the elves, it was literally as genetic as it was cultural.
And everyone inside that cage had to deal with its bars every single day.
But the elves were trying. It was like eating healthy when every single one of your genes screamed I’m gonna explode your heart and kill ya early. Hence the mistakes with the vampires.
And here Ed was offering up a new sacrifice to that very same mistake by promising a kelpie access to the same floundering attempt at expanding their horizons that had let vampires into Alfheim in the first place.
What the hell was wrong with him? No kelpies in Alfheim.
“You think you’re in a cage?” Ed yelled. “What’d you do to get yourself locked up, Dumbass McHorseface? Huh? Besides all the murdering and trafficking and dark fae-ing? You know, the behaviors that should get you put down, not locked up?” He aimed the shotgun again.
For a split second, Ranger’s face fell as if he were a kid who’d just realized how terrible he was for kicking the dog. But that look vanished as quickly as it had appeared and the kelpie’s face stretched out into that terrified crazy look of manic fury.
“Ranger…” Wrenn held out her hand. “Give me the sword.”
He glared at her. “I remember this sword,” he growled.
Wrenn dropped her hand. “What?”
“She remembers me,” he said. “Why d’ ye think I can hold her? Why d’ ye think she keeps callin’ out about bindin’ Fenrir?”
“Set. It. Down, Ranger,” Wrenn said. “Now.”
“Tell me where my kids are!” Ed yelled. “Did the vamps take them?”
“Dinnae ken! Dinnae care, lawman!” Ranger bellowed.
“I’ve killed a vamp,” Ed snarled. “I’ll kill a kelpie, too.”
“Oh, aren’t we manly!” Ranger made a kissy face. “Perhaps ye are like-minded.”
“Stop!” Wrenn yelled.
She pointed at the brush about twenty feet down the beach.
Sophia stood on the sand, her brother behind her with his hand on her shoulder. “We ran when the vampires…” She inhaled. “The one shot the other one with the hat.”
“Then he used a machete, Papa. Sophia didn’t see,” Gabe said.
Which meant he had. He’d seen a vampire behead another vampire. In real life, under a Texas moon, on a real beach.
Ed’s kids knew his job sometimes involved bad things, and that sometimes those bad things were horrible and terrifying and that they gave both Momma and Papa bad dreams.
But they didn’t have specifics about the bad things. They thought violence meant hitting your sibling and him saying Ow! They thought breaking the law meant a stern talking-to from someone in a brown Alfheim County Sheriff Department uniform.
The vast majority of his job was issuing warnings and directing traffic. But sometimes there were vampires. Sometimes there were kelpies. And sometimes there were fae problems that meant his kids saw things they should not.
“That sword would have killed
