I looked at the cat again.
“Hang on. It is you, isn’t it?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”
Light flared, and when I blinked my vision clear, an attractive, androgynous humanoid figure crouched where the cat had been. The cat-sidhe’s head tilted curiously, green eyes still fixed on me.
“I bring news of your sire, demonkin.”
Rans stepped forward. “How can you have news of someone residing in Hell, Fae?”
The shape-shifter threw him an irritated look. “Because he is no longer residing in Hell, obviously. That is the news I bring—do try to keep up, vampire.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach. “He’s... not...?”
“Okay,” Guthrie said. “Can we just back up for a minute here?” He pointed at the cat-sidhe. “You’re Fae?” His finger moved to the woman—Neveah, if I was remembering right. “And you’re... what?”
“A journalist,” the woman said helpfully. “Now, about Mr. Benecea—”
Journalist? More like a stalker, I couldn’t help thinking.
“Nigellus isn’t reachable at the moment,” Rans said in a hard tone. “He didn’t accompany us here.”
Neveah’s entire demeanor drooped. “Oh. That’s quite a disappointment.” She turned a gimlet eye on the cat-sidhe. “I thought you said he’d be here.”
The Fae stared right back. “I said he might be here. There’s a difference.”
“Hmph. Well, if you’ve no more need of me, I’ll be off, in that case,” Neveah said. “If you see him, do let the infuriating man know that I was asking after him, won’t you?”
Without waiting for an answer, she turned and huffed her way back down the beach, disappearing in the direction she’d come from. On the positive side, the bizarre exchange had given me enough time to drag my wits back into some kind of order.
“My father,” I told the cat-sidhe. “Tell me everything you know.”
The Fae eyed me as though I were dim. “I just told you. Your sire is no longer in Hell. That is the news, demonkin. It seemed important, so I thought you should be informed.”
“But... that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Humans can’t leave Hell without a demon-bond.”
The shape-shifter shrugged. “Quite so.”
No, I thought, as the realization sank into me. Oh... no, no, no.
“He wouldn’t do that, though,” I replied, a bit desperately. “He promised.”
“Where is he now?” Rans asked, more practically. “Do you know?”
“He is at home,” said the Fae.
“You mean Chicago?” I hazarded.
“No,” said the creature. “Your home.”
Silence fell for a long beat before Guthrie broke it.
“Right, then.” His tone was resigned. “Are you sure you won’t be coming back to St. Louis with me, you two?”
FOUR
“IF I GO BACK, will I just be putting Dad in more danger, though?” I wondered. “I mean... no matter how big the target on my father’s back might be, the one on mine is probably bigger.” My hands tangled in my hair in frustration. “Argh. I warned him not to accept any demon bonds! Why would he do something like this?”
Guthrie’s expression, which had wavered between wary and bewildered, closed off like a blast door coming down—reminding me that sometimes people had very good reasons for doing foolish things.
The cat-sidhe shrugged. “Why do humans do anything?”
Rans sighed. “Right. Well, it’s your call, love. Though you should probably make it soon, since the furball here would be our quickest method of moderately secure transportation.”
I turned to the pixie-like Fae. “You’d take us to him?”
“Not directly. I’ve never been there before.”
“So, you can’t travel to St. Louis by portal?” I asked.
“No,” said the Fae. “I suppose I could take you to wherever the ley lines run closest, though.”
“We could fly the rest of the way,” Rans offered. “It wouldn’t be terribly far.”
It took me a moment to realize that he meant fly as mist, because that was a thing I could do now. My eyes fell on Guthrie, and I frowned. “Have... um... have you done the whole ‘incorporeal’ thing yet?”
I couldn’t think of any point since Guthrie was turned when Rans would have had enough time alone with him to teach him how to transform, like he’d taught me the previous evening. Guthrie only snorted, though.
“Yeah... there was the small matter of my body unexpectedly dissolving into mist when one of those assholes on the boat jabbed a dagger point in the direction of my face,” he said. “Talk about on-the-job training.”
I winced, and then winced again as I realized Guthrie had later taken a silver knife between the ribs when he’d been trying to drown the last Fae. If he’d already known how to transform by then, he could have avoided the injury, presumably—but he hadn’t, because he’d been more focused on ensuring that the Fae who’d been about to kill me was dead.
“Well, then,” Rans said. “What’s it to be, love?”
I chewed my lower lip, only to stop myself when I remembered the potential for unintended fang damage.
“Dad was pretty far gone for a while, there,” I said slowly. “But he seemed much more like himself the last time I saw him. I don’t think he would have done something like this for a frivolous reason.”
“You think he came back to Earth because he has some kind of message for you?” Guthrie asked.
I lifted my hands and let them fall back against my hips, at a loss. “I mean... maybe?”
Christ. Who was I kidding with my waffling? Of course I was going to go to him. That was our family script, after all. He did whatever the hell he felt like, and I nipped along at his heels, in hopes that this would be the time he finally acted like the dad I’d always wanted.
After twenty years of practice, it was kind of our thing, okay?
My body deflated, and I scrubbed at my eye sockets. “All right,” I said. “I have to go find out what happened. I owe him that much.”
“You don’t owe him anything,” Rans said evenly. “Not that I expect you to truly believe that.”
I drew a deep—and thoroughly unnecessary—breath. “Guthrie was going back to
