In one long rambling, high-speed sentence, I spilled. “There’s another Tracker in London and I’m going to meet him in three days and I can’t even believe that this is happening and I have no one else to tell ‘cause I kicked Milly out and the FBI is going to have someone take care of Giselle while I’m gone and they’re even going to pay us!”
Charlie looked at me, his eyebrows lowered, and he lifted his hands as if to slow me down. “Easy, lass. Are yous sure yous not been fed anything strange? Ogre beer, perhaps?”
I scrubbed my face with my hands. “No, sorry, I just . . . I just thought I was alone.”
The brownie smiled up at me. “Yous never been alone, Rylee. Yous got lots who love you. Me for one. The big blue ox down south, and Ogre’s don’t give their loyalty easy like. Alex here, of course, he’ll never leave yous.”
We headed into the kitchen. “I know that. I don’t mean, it’s just . . . Charlie, if there were no other brownies, how would you know all the things you could or couldn’t do?”
He opened his mouth as if to argue, but paused. “Damn me, I guess I wouldn’t. Well, no, some things I’d figure out.”
I poured him a shot of Milly’s best whiskey and handed the glass to him, then poured a glass of orange juice for myself.
“Exactly. Once I meet this other Tracker, I’ll finally have someone to show me all the things I can do. I’ve no doubt there’s more to my abilities than what I’ve figured out on my own. Maybe there’s nothing else, but at least I’ll know.”
Charlie climbed onto the kitchen chair so we were eye level, his glimmering with tears. He’d lost everything, his wife and children. So the idea that we could help others find their kids, well, it was almost as much a drive for him as it was for me.
“And then yous can help even more of the wee ones with what you learn. Ah, I see now why you be so excited.”
Nodding, I clinked my glass to his. “Exactly.”
4
“Eve, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t important,” I said as I stared up at the juvenile Harpy pacing around my backyard. She was well over a thousand pounds, with beak, wings, and talons of a bird, but her upper body was human looking, complete with all the trappings of being female. Lower body was all bird, her massive wings set just behind the blending of skin and feathers.
She’d flown back to North Dakota as soon as I’d called down to her, Dox passing on the message for me. Most surprising was that she’d brought presents for each of us; a fossilized bone for Alex that he’d been chewing since she’d given it to him, an obsidian blade for me, and a necklace for Giselle. That last was the most disturbing because it had not come from Eve.
It had come from Doran.
I held it for a long time before handing it over to Giselle, unsure of what it would do, if anything. She’d just let it fall from her fingers, not even watching when it hit the ground. So that was that.
Alex, his new bone, and Giselle were curled up in several blankets on the back porch, watching us. Alex gave Eve a double thumbs up while Giselle continued to mutter about blue socks.
“Rylee, it isn’t that I don’t want to help you,” Eve said, as she continued to stride about, her clawed feet turning the snow and ice into a slurry of pale brown mud. “But the idea of being spelled is . . . .” She turned large golden eyes to me. She’d been held captive by a Coven of black witches when I’d first met her. Things hadn’t gone so well for the witches, but they hadn’t gone so well for Eve and her sisters, either. Only Eve was left, courtesy of me and my blades.
“I understand,” I said, laying the clasp in front of her. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was necessary. You know Europe and the supernaturals there better than I do. ”
That was the truth. She’d lived there in her early years before coming to America with her sisters. Or, more accurately, until they took off from Europe because their Clutch evicted them.
Eve fluttered her wings. She’d been training with Eagle, a tribal Guardian in New Mexico, for over a month. Already I could see the changes in her, maturity that hadn’t been there before, not just jumping into things, overall a better control of her emotions—something essential to a Harpy, at least as far as I was concerned. Whatever training she was getting, it was doing her a world of good. Perhaps I should have let her stay with Eagle, should have done this salvage on my own.
No, I couldn’t trust the FBI to actually help me, and the gods only knew what I’d be facing over there. Without Milly or O’Shea at my side, I knew enough to know that I couldn’t do this run alone. Call it a gut feeling, intuition, or whatever the hell you want, everything about this run screamed at me to take all the ammunition I could. Not a good sign, but one I would deal with.