Swallowing hard, I forced my feet to carry me into the room until I was standing directly in front of my father’s chair. He didn’t move, the chair resting motionless on its curved wooden rockers. His eyes were focused on nothing, staring right through me. I shivered.
Please, please, please let me not have come all this way only to find that Darryl Bright was gone, only the empty shell of a body left behind, I thought. Please let me not be too late.
Albigard entered, throwing the cat a disgusted look when it growled low in its chest at him. “Guards are approaching. They will be here momentarily, at which point you will once again be my prisoner.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I begged.
The Fae ran careless eyes over the man in the chair. “He’s broken, apparently. It happens sometimes, with humans.” He paused for the barest instant before adding, “I am sorry, demonkin.”
I made a small noise in my throat and dropped to my knees, my hands gripping Dad’s where they rested on the chair’s arms. “Dad, please...”
My father’s eyes focused slowly, returning from that distant, unseen place. I caught my breath.
“Dad?”
He blinked, looking at me properly for the first time, and his brow furrowed. “Zorah? Why are you here? I don’t want you here. Go away.”
His voice was perfectly flat, and I had to swallow a moan of denial. Before I could respond, the front door crashed open. The cat hissed again, leaping from its perch on the bed as several Fae appeared at the bedroom’s entrance. Albigard dragged me to my feet and swung us around, cool and collected as though armed guards swarmed the room where he was standing every day of the week.
“Hold, Sergeant,” he said, sounding arrogant and bored. Disdain dripped from his voice. “I have an important prisoner for the Court to examine.”
The guard looked at me like one might look at a wounded mouse caught in a mousetrap.
“Commander,” he said grudgingly. “This is the part-bred demon? If it’s your prisoner, why bring it here?”
I might have appreciated the jaundiced look Albigard gave the guard if my heart weren’t trying to thud its way straight out of my chest.
“That one is her sire,” he said, jerking his chin toward the rocking chair. “Where else would I deliver her? You and your men are here now, are you not? So take her off my hands and be done with it.”
The guard wavered. “Very well,” he said eventually. “But I will give a full accounting of all this to the Recorder.”
Albigard cocked a slanted brow. “As you like, Sergeant. Though, as the Recorder was the one who directed me here, it seems rather a waste of time and effort.”
With that, he handed me over to the wiry Sergeant, who regarded me with distaste. When the Fae guard’s hand closed around my arm, I felt my future narrow to a single point of darkness.
“I love you, Dad,” I croaked... but my father had already returned to whatever distant place he now inhabited. A place I could no longer reach. He didn’t even look at me as I was pulled from the room.
“Come, part-breed,” the sergeant grumbled, tugging me away from my only tie to Earth... to my home.
ELEVEN
I THREW A FINAL glance over my shoulder at Albigard, trying to convey the threat of dire consequences if he failed to do all he could for whatever was left of my father. He gazed back with every indication of complete disinterest, his green eyes without expression.
I had played the only card available to me, bet everything on this gamble. And there was every possibility that doing so had gained me precisely nothing. Nothing except a faster death than I might’ve had before, assuming the Fae decided to take the easy way out and have done with me.
At least Rans is safe, I tried to tell myself. With me gone, they would have no reason to go after him.
Yeah, sure, said the little internal voice that whispered bad things to me in the dark. Just like no one had a reason to blast a hole through his chest with a shotgun. He hadn’t even met you yet when that happened.
My throat tightened, denial burning like acid at the backs of my eyes. Jesus, I was such an idiot.
That’s the real reason he’s better off without you, the voice whispered. Your own dad doesn’t even want you. Nobody wants you. Hell, you can probably count the number of people who’ll even notice that you’re gone on the fingers of one hand.
I wrenched my attention outward, consigning that little voice to the darkness where it belonged.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked my captors, the words emerging unsteady.
The guards—half a dozen or so—formed a loose ring around us as the sergeant frog-marched me out of the little cottage. No one answered or even acknowledged that I’d spoken. The one at the front paused and muttered, throwing a new portal into existence. It seemed less stable than the ones I’d seen Albigard make—the outline hazy and wavering—but the others didn’t hesitate to step through.
A moment of sickening disorientation, and I was once more in the overgrown, downtowny looking area that Albigard and I had departed from earlier. Indeed, we were outside the very same building, I was fairly sure, though this time the sergeant hauled me around to a back entrance rather than walking in the front door.
The same white-haired Recorder guy met us, satisfaction visible on his wrinkled features. “So, you found the malcontent waiting there as I thought you would. Very good.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant. “Shall I take this creature to the incarceration area now?”
“Do so,” said the Recorder. “I will make the necessary entry into the records. And I believe there is at least one operative on Earth who will appreciate being
