- Chapter 22

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# CHAPTER NINE

Belinda concealed herself and the entirely too fancy T-Bird along a riding path just out of sight of the Chevy and her targets. There was no way she was going to get out of her vehicle around that hexed Chevy again. There was no telling what might happen to her. She remembered the incongruous picture of a horse trotting through the night behind her first rental car, after the damned race-driver stole it—and the way the Chevy was mysteriously missing when she went back to try stealing it. She recalled the odd behavior of the '57's doors the time she ended up as Mac's captive. Certain pieces of her last few days began to form a picture—one she didn't like at all.

In a sudden burst of curiosity, and with some trepidation, she took the little black meter out of her pocketbook and flashed it at the car. The needle quivered and moved steadily across the scale, wavering slightly as it hit 3.71 P and came to a halt. Goosebumps rose on her arms, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. A car sitting in a field doing not a goddamned thing rates higher on the psi scale than any people I've ever checked—except that bastard Mac Lynn and his blond bimbo mechanic.

It figures, she thought. She panned the psi-meter in a semicircle that encompassed the general direction in which Mac and company had been heading, and left room over for error. Sure enough, she picked up one narrow burst of activity at about 8 P's of intensity—mid-scale, and another of about the same reading. That would be the two of them, she thought—Mac and the mechanic. She scanned beyond them from force of habit, letting the meter play across the field at the dreary mix of scrub-oaks and long-leaf pines—

About fifteen degrees west of her two identified targets, the needle dove all the way across into the red zone, hitting 30 P, then kept moving until it vanished into the out of range sector. It stayed there.

Belinda leaned her head against the headrest and stared at the little ventilation dots in the car's headliner until her eyes unfocused and the dots blurred and appeared to move toward her. What the hell have I gotten myself into? she wondered. The car, the driver, the mechanic—and something huge out there in the woods. Either this place is a hotbed of psi activity—or something is wrong with my meter.

Now, that was a genuinely comforting thought. She knew she didn't even raise a .01 P blip on Mel's scale—she shuddered to think what might have happened to her if she had—so maybe her meter was screwed or picking up something else. Something cars and normal people and whatever radiated.

She pointed the psi-meter at herself and pushed the button.

The needle didn't budge. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Her eyes narrowed, and she pointed at her own car. She obtained the same results. To her left, coming from the same general direction as all the psi activity, a kid in a pink raincoat shot through the woods at high speed. She was heading straight for the fancy house with all the horses and pastures. Testing, testing, Belinda thought, and aimed the meter at her.

"Shit. Shit-shit-shit-shit-double shit!" Belinda snarled. The needle had again shot all the way across the meter and buried itself in the out of range zone. She flung the black box across the seat, and stared at the galloping kid. What are the odds? she wondered. Just what are the fucking odds of running into that many TK's in one place?

She bit her lip. The odds are probably better than running into them one at a time and spread all over, she decided after long contemplation, if their being here was no coincidence. Do psychics attract psychics? And another thought, straight out of a Spielberg movie: Do adult psychics track down kids?

Her head throbbed, and the thinking she was forced to do was making it worse, but the pain pills would make her fall asleep if she took any. Live with the pain, she told herself. You may be about done with it anyway, champ. 'Cause kids are little and weak and naive—and they don't drive haunted '57 Chevys. And I'm betting you can heist a little kid way out here in the sticks without anyone being the wiser.

A thought occurred to her. There were kids all over the racetrack the day I did my little set-up. Wouldn't it just be a bitch if the kid was the one I was looking for after all? She started her engine and pulled carefully out onto the road that led past the kid's house.

"Kendrick," the mailbox said. And the flowing script on the sandblasted wooden shingle read, "KENDRICK'S BAL-A-SAR STABLES—FINE ARABIANS."

Horses, huh? I can fake it with the horsey set. Oh, yeah, kid . . . I can find you with no trouble at all. A new haircut, and a pair of jodhpurs and riding boots, and I'll be back.

* * *

Mel Tanbridge drove through Fayetteville accompanied by his constant companion, distaste. Military towns annoyed him. The entertainment wasn't classy enough, the architecture was just plain drab, and the people themselves—well, he decided, the less thought about them the better. Rude, crude, and obnoxious were the kindest adjectives he could come up with for these peons.

Take the maids at the hotel Stevens had been staying at, for instance. Stevens' room was paid through the end of the week, and they knew he'd been staying there, but they refused to tell him anything about the man—whether he'd left in a hurry, who he'd been with—anything. They'd told him hotel visitors were confidential guests (the way they pronounced "confidential" positively made Mel's skin crawl), and even when he'd flashed a couple of twenties in their direction, they'd blinked their stupid cow eyes at him and said they didn't know anything. He was ready to believe them—the bitches. He'd gone on to break into Stevens' hotel room and had scoured it with a thoroughness that would have left the simple-minded maids chartreuse with envy. He came out with more questions than he took in.

The room was beyond nondescript. That fit well enough with Stevens' character. The thing that puzzled him was that most of Stevens' belongings were still in it. The money was not to be found, of course—except for a bit of change on the dresser that made his stomach twitch in uncomfortable ways. Nobody left change if they weren't intending to come back—and pretty promptly, too, in cheap hotels. His bags were present, his clothes still balled up in the drawers. The bed was made, and the maids had placed the pile of dirty clothes neatly on the room's single chair next to the ubiquitous round hotel table under the equally ever-present hanging hotel lamp.

He left carefully, feeling that he had missed something important, but having absolutely no idea what that something might have been.

On his way to his next stop, Peterkin's hotel, he puzzled over the scene and came up completely empty. The room was a blank—there was nothing incriminating, nothing that gave him a clue to what might have happened to his employee.

He hoped for better luck at Peterkin's place.

His hopes fell with his first sight of the place. Stevens' hotel had been bland—but Peterkin's was positively tacky. It was one of those "adult" motels with twenty-four-hour hot and cold running movies and beds that wiggled for a quarter—no doubt so the rented rubber dummy would feel like it had a bit of life to it, Mel thought with disgust. While he might have more luck bribing the help, he doubted that he would find anything useful in a dump like the one in front of him. Then again, he thought, I doubt they ever sweep under the beds here. I might find something useful.

He obtained the room number from the blowsy, rumpled tub of a woman who sat at the front desk. He went back to his car and watched until no one was on the breezeway. Then he slipped up the steps and, ignoring the "Do Not Disturb" sign hung on the door, used one of the little tricks he'd learned from the burglar he kept on staff. He broke in without so much as a sound.

He closed the door quietly behind himself and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, he wished they hadn't.

"Christ!" he yelped. Peterkin and Stevens were in the middle of something he would never have credited them with having the imagination for—or rather, he noted, as their silence and stillness caught his attention, they had been.

The moment that he took a deep breath, he knew that they were dead. What had caused their deaths seemed pretty evident, too. Drug paraphernalia was laid out on the dresser, and they didn't have any visible wounds—

He walked through the room, careful not to touch anything until he'd taken a towel from the bathroom. He used that to open drawers and look over the IDs lying on the dresser. They were false ones, he noted, but not the same false ones Stevens and Peterkin had left California with. Interesting, he thought. Those are the ones Belinda had on hand for emergencies.

There were only a few low-denomination bills and some change in the room, and Mel left all of the money. It wouldn't do to make this look like they'd been robbed. He left the false ID's, too. They were very good and very solid—he even had a couple of "widows" who would be only too happy to collect the insurance on their late "husbands." Best of all, they wouldn't be traced back to him.

Mel backed out of the room and closed the door behind him. He heard the lock click into place. Immediately, he began beating on the door and yelling, "I know you're in there, Kraft! I want my money, dammit! Open the door! You owe me eight hundred bucks, you flake! Pay up!"

Hotel management, in the form of the overweight woman, appeared at the foot of the stairs. "Sheddup or ah'll call the cops," she yelled. "Don' you go raisin' hell aroun' my place."

Mel took on a menacing air. "Lady, that S.O.B. owes my company eight hundred bucks—and he skipped town to keep from paying it. I'm the collector—I tracked him down here, and now I want my money. You see these papers?" He waved several sheets of paper at her from his safe spot at the top of the steps; papers that were actually contracts with his brochure printer back in California. "These say I have a right to collect that money, and if I don't get it, I'm going to call the cops and have them raid this dive."

The woman studied him from the foot of the stairs, her bright black eyes nearly hidden in the rolls of fat. She grimaced and mumbled, "Aw, shee-it. Ah don' need that again." She waddled back toward the office, muttering over her massive shoulder-pads, "Jes' wait a dam' minute while ah git my keys."

After she returned and moved her vast bulk up the narrow cement staircase, Mel took his expectant place half a step behind her.

He waited, feigning impatience while she pounded on the door, then fumbled with the keys when she got no answer. He pretended not to watch her closely as she opened the door and flipped on the light. He noted, however, her absolute lack of shock as her eyes took in the room, its inhabitants, and the attendant sex toys and drugs.

"Oh, my," she whispered, her eyes gleaming with vicarious pleasure. "Oh my, oh my! Will you jes' look at that! Imagine them doin' that in mah nice clean mo-tel!"

"Dammit," Mel said, making sure she heard him. "There goes my eight hundred dollars."

Mel slipped back to his car and drove off before the police could arrive. He returned the Lincoln, took the shuttle to the Fayetteville airport, then another to a second car rental agency, where he used an alternate alias to pick up a car as different from the previous one as he could find—a bright blue Geo Metro. He didn't want to be bothered with the police in a town that had the two strikes against it of being military—and Southern.

Then he drove out toward Belinda's last reported address. The situation so far was not at all what he had anticipated. He didn't think for a minute that Stevens and Peterkin had died in the way they appeared to have. He felt the touch of his favorite redhead stamped all over their dead bodies. But there might be extenuating circumstances. It might be that he wouldn't have to terminate her from his payroll—he chuckled at that euphemism—as soon as he'd anticipated. But he would be careful. After all, she was dangerous—part of her charm—and one never knew.

* * *

Mac was as weary as he had ever been. The rain died down to a cold, sullen drizzle, punctuated by cloudburst exclamation points that showered the woods around them. Lianne and Mac trudged through the ugly weather, untouched.

"That was Amanda's hideout," Mac noted abruptly, breaking a silence that had carried them from the tree to the edge of the woods behind the child's house.

"Really?" Lianne said, sounding surprised. "How did you—oh."

Mac did not ask her what the "oh" meant. Perhaps she remembered catching sight of bits of bright junk that had hung on strings from the branches, decorating the tree like treasures in a magpie's nest. Perhaps she simply deduced—correctly—that he had been here before.

Lianne shuddered. "You don't suppose she was anywhere around those—things—do you?"

I would bet she had something to do with getting them here, Mac thought, but he didn't say it. There were so many things about the kid that didn't fit. She knew he was an elf, then she didn't. She did magic but didn't believe in it. She walked out of Elfhame Outremer on her own—a pure impossibility. To Lianne, he only said, "I hope not." That at least was the truth.

He covered the two of them with his "I'm not here" shield, and they moved out of the woods and across the yard.

"God—the police are here!" Lianne froze, then started backing toward the woods.

Mac grabbed her arm. "They can't see us," he whispered.

"Are you really, really sure?"

He gave her a half-smile. "Well, don't run up and pinch them on the noses to test this—but yes, I'm sure. We still show up on film and video, still leave footprints, but someone looking right at us won't see us. Wonder what they're doing here—"

"Rummaging through that little barn. Obviously." Lianne started forward. "Come on—let's take a look."

Maclyn lingered back as Power, twisted and sick, hit him like a board to the front of the head. "Gods," he whispered, "what happened in there?"

Lianne looked up at him and arched her eyebrows in a silent question.

"Are you familiar with the human term `bad ju-ju'?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I've heard it. Means—oh, black magic, or something."

Mac watched the police with wary eyes. "Or something, actually. Well, bad ju-ju is stamped all over that little barn in glowing letters ten feet high. Something happened here, but not what the police see."

She shook her head, obviously confused. "The monsters under the tree again?"

Mac closed his eyes and stood very still, his head tipped to one side. "Funny—" he started to say something, then fell silent. Finally, he shook himself and looked at Lianne again. "You are almost right about comparing this to the battle this morning," he told her. "The traces of magic in the barn have some of the same touches as those golems had—but this magic is tied in to someone else as well. It almost feels like some kind of a ritual—group magic, or something involving a group." He wrinkled his nose and walked toward the barn.

"Bad ju-ju," Lianne snarled behind him, and followed his lead.

Mac's nerves screamed with every step that drew him nearer to the barn. The little building reeked of power drawn from pain—but the signatures of the magic-wielders and the victims were so tangled that he couldn't get a clear picture. When he glanced inside, his stomach twisted like a knife-pinned snake, and he drew in a breath between clenched teeth. The contents of the structure had been shredded apart fiber by fiber—he had seen the results of a food processor on occasion and had no difficulty imagining that the inside of the barn had been through one. The taint of Unseleighe work reeked through the place. And where, in all of this, did they fit in? So far, his dark kindred hadn't shown so much as a hair.

Mac and Lianne stayed to the shadows and watched the policemen digging through the mess.

"You find anything?" one of the officers asked.

"Sawdust," the other answered. "Plenty of sawdust. And I'll tell you something, Sammy—if we rake through this shit till the end of forever, that's all we're going to find."

The first speaker straightened and groaned. "Yeah. I think you're right. This place gives me the creeps. Feels like something's watching all the damn time."

Lianne gave Maclyn a worried look. He grimaced and shrugged.

The cop continued. "Why don't we check outside—maybe we'll find tire marks or something."

"After all this rain?" the second policeman snorted. But then he grinned. "Hell, walkin' in the rain is a damnsight cozier than pokin' around in here. Let's go." Both policemen headed for the door.

Lianne heard one mumble as they stepped outside, "Wish to hell I knew what could do that."

Mac leaned over and whispered in Lianne's ear, "I know what did it—I just wish I knew who'd summoned one up."

Lianne shuddered under his hand. "So tell me, what does do more damage than Hell's Cuisinart?"

He almost wished he didn't know. "A banesidhe wind—deadly, borderline intelligent, called up from the lairs of what you might call the Dark Elves. They're pure destructive energy. Pain and hatred born of torture on this plane create them out of the raw stuff of the Unformed Plane—but to `create' one here, to call it out from its Unseleighe hiding place, the magician has to know it, to know that fear, that hate, that pain. And there aren't many magicians strong enough to call one out who are willing to be tortured to make one."

Outside the barn, they heard Andrew Kendrick talking with the policemen. He was not happy. "You mean to tell me you've spent all morning poking around in my kid's barn, and you still don't know who vandalized it?"

An unhappy voice answered. "Mister Kendrick—we can't even begin to figure out how they did it. Given a few hours, maybe somebody could wreck things that completely—but not in a few minutes."

"Dammit," Kendrick snapped. And after a pause, he added, in a voice thick with sarcasm, "I can tell my tax dollars have been well spent on you two."

It's Amanda's barn. It was Amanda's hideout tree. Her classroom. And the magic signatures in all of these places have been the same. They haven't been Amanda—but they have all been the same! Who is with her doing Unseleighe magic? And why?

A different man walked into the barn and was framed for an instant in the dreary outdoor light at the doorway. He was tall, with sandy hair and light eyes, broad shoulders and the very early signs of a potbelly to come. He would have been a handsome man, but his expression was ugly, his lips clamped firmly on a smoldering cigarette, his demeanor cold and calculating. The man scanned the interior of the barn, his eyes fixing on Mac and Lianne and flicking quickly past them. Mac felt Lianne jerk once beside him.

The feel of this man was in the barn, too. His was the second signature present—and Mac would have taken him for the magician and maybe the torturer—but while the man had strong magical potential, it was completely latent. Still, the man carried a store of repressed hatred so deep-burning and all-consuming that the elf felt it as a physical presence.

Father and daughter in league with the Unseleighe Court? Maybe—but somehow none of the pieces fit—

Kendrick walked to the back left corner of the gutted building and started digging through the drifts of debris.

Father and daughter—and torture . . . there has to have been some kind of torture to have conjured the banesidhe wind. Mac clenched his hands and glared at the man across the little barn from him. It's sure that the child didn't torture her father—but there was torment wrought here, and it has his signature on it. But stress has brought out mage-powers in humans before. . . .

Latent mage torturing developing mage. That matched. He took a deep breath to calm himself and leaned back against the wall.

There's my proof of abuse.

* * *

Belinda walked into her hotel room, and reacted an instant too late as the cold, heavy barrel of a gun was pressed against her ribs, preventing her from backing out of the room. A leather-gloved hand clapped over her mouth.

"Don't move or you're dead," the voice in her left ear said in an equitable and utterly reasonable tone of voice.

"Mel?" The word sounded muffled through the heavy padding of the glove.

A delicate snort, and the gun-muzzle didn't move a hair, but the glove moved enough so that she could talk, at least. "In the flesh. That was quite a nice little tableau you left at Peterkin's hotel. Very artistic. I always have liked your style."

"Why are you here, Mel?" Belinda couldn't feel, in her heart of hearts, any deep urge to be chatty.

"You haven't brought me my TK yet," he chided gently. "And then Stevens and Peterkin vanished off the face of the planet, and you hadn't called in days—I started feeling a little lonely. And I thought you might have reeled in the TK and then found a higher bidder." His hand tightened over her mouth, and the gun began moving in slow, gentle circles over her side, and the glove covered her mouth again. "You haven't found a higher bidder, have you, dear?"

Belinda tried to clear her mouth of the glove, and failed. "Foo-fif fiff-feff!" she spat.

"Beg pardon?" Mel chuckled softly in her ear and lessened the pressure on her mouth.

"You stupid shithead!" Belinda repeated. "Do I look like I've been rolling in somebody else's money and taking it easy at your expense?"

Mel said, "Stay still." He released her and moved to one side of her. Now they were both reflected in the mirror across from her. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that the gun was still pointed steadily at her midsection. She kept her hands away from her sides and stared straight into the mirror on the far wall. She could see him taking in the bruises, the bandages on her head, the dark circles under her eyes and the gaunt hollows in her cheeks that hadn't been there when she left California. "Now that you mention it, you look like you've been dancing with trucks. What's been going on?"

She snorted. "You didn't tell me how dangerous hunting down a telekinetic could be."

Mel's eyes narrowed. "I didn't know. The racecar driver did all that to you?"

She shrugged. "Yes he did, in a roundabout fashion I would rather not discuss. I've got you a better prospect. I've found a child who is a sure thing—an even stronger talent than the driver. I'll get her for you—she's bound to be less dangerous to rope in than Mac Lynn. I'm going to kill him after you have the girl." Belinda smiled and rubbed absently at the bandage on her head. "Unless I have the opportunity to do it beforehand."

"You've really found someone else?" Mel's voice sounded eager.

Belinda eased into the Naugahyde chair beside the bed. "Just today—a little girl. Lynn led me to her. Probably, oh, eight or ten years old. A kid would be very easy to work with, wouldn't she? I figure whatever you have planned, it would be less hassle to do with someone smaller."

In the mirror, Mel's eyes brightened. "Check her out. TK ability is supposed to show up right around the time puberty strikes, and is supposed to be more common in girls. This kid fits the profile."

Mel ran one hand along the line of his jaw and stared at a nonexistent point somewhere over Belinda's left shoulder. "A child would be good—very good. Little girls are pliable and agreeable; I could probably obtain her cooperation with a few grand in toys—whereas getting cooperation from an adult male for what I have in mind would require . . . more complicated measures." His voice faded off into nothing, and he refocused on Belinda. "Why did you kill Stevens and Peterkin?"

She yawned. "They double-crossed me. I don't take that from anyone, especially not from the hired muscle."

Mel sat on the long dresser that also acted as the motel room's writing desk. He crossed his arms and let the muzzle of the gun dip toward the floor. "The word `double-cross' is open to a wide range of interpretations. Be more specific."

She spread her hands wide and gave him her most innocent expression—hard to do with all the bruises. "I should have had him on his way to you in a bag yesterday. They withheld a drug that would have knocked Mac Lynn out, then lied to me about it. I can't figure out what they hoped to gain by that maneuver, but there is no doubt that they lied to me. I tested the remainder of the drug on the two of them, just to make sure it wasn't faulty—you found the results, apparently."

Belinda went into greater detail, stopping only when Mel asked questions. She went over each point until she was sick of talking about it—and finally Mel seemed satisfied.

Mel lay the gun on the dresser top. "You aren't lying about this. I can always tell." He pulled one knee up to his chin and rested with his arms wrapped around his leg. He looked genuinely bewildered. "Why the hell would they turn traitor on me? They knew what I would do to them if they tried—God knows, they carried out my sentence on a couple of their colleagues."

Belinda leaned her head back and tried to relax enough to get it to stop throbbing. "I have no idea. I searched their rooms, their possessions, their car, their pockets—everything I could think of. I couldn't find anything incriminating." She sighed. "Whoever bought them kept the whole deal very well hidden—and they must have been offering a fortune. I just can't figure out why anyone would pay so much for such a ridiculous thing as a TK." She glanced at Mel through half-lidded eyes. "No offense intended."

Mel's face twitched into a slimy smile. "None taken. I know why someone would offer a fortune—you haven't seen the private offers that come across the desk of anyone who might have access to, ah, commodities like Mac Lynn. Believe me, dear, he's worth more to you on the hoof than in the bag."

"Pardon me for not giving a flying fuck." Belinda laughed. "I guarantee you he's worth more to me spread-eagled on a rock somewhere with a white-hot poker in his ass."

"Tch-tch," Mel said, shaking his finger reprovingly at her. "Language like that is not becoming a lady."

Belinda made a full-forearm gesture at him and ignored her boss' raised eyebrows. "I'll get you a TK. But I've gone through hell you wouldn't believe"—quite literally couldn't believe, she thought—"trying to get this one. You'll get the kid. And I'm going to take that creep out all by myself."

Mel patted the gun that lay beside him. "We really must talk sometime about this habit you have of killing people who annoy you, Belinda dear."

Belinda's laugh was short and harsh. "You should bloody talk."

He chuckled. "Not at all. I would never think of killing someone just because he—or she—has annoyed me. For example, Belinda, you annoy me, but you are useful. I only kill those people who are dangerous to me or who are of no further use to me alive." He smiled gently. "I thought you had passed that line, dear. I truly did."

A cold knot formed in Belinda's belly, and she repressed the shudder she didn't want Mel to see. "Friends again?" she asked with false cheerfulness.

His smile was just as false. "Of course—now that I know you're still playing on my team. I make it a point to stay friends with the people on my team. Get me my kid tomorrow or the next day, and we'll even be best buddies."

Belinda nodded, and winced as her hair moved with the nod. There were a lot of bruises under that hair. "I'll go out tomorrow. I already know how I'm going to get close. First, though, I've got to get some sleep, and then I'm going to the beauty parlor. I'm not going to be able to get anywhere near her looking like this. I'll have your kid for you in a day or two."

"Fine." Mel's eyebrows furrowed, and he looked down at his shoes for a long, silent moment. "I think I might like to go along to pick her up," he said when he finally looked up. "I want to have a good look at my merchandise."

Belinda sighed. "Hey, it's your party. Just so long as you still intend to pay me the full price, you are welcome to come along."

Mel chuckled. "You mean you aren't inclined to give me a discount if I come along and help out?"

She gave him a look of disdain. "You came along too late to earn a discount. Hell, I deserve a bonus just for pain and suffering incurred."

"We'll see." Mel stood, and they watched each other warily. Then Mel slipped the gun into the holster hidden beneath his windbreaker, and keeping his eyes fixed on Belinda, he eased out of the room. "I'll be in touch. Or if you need me, call me at the Prince Charles. I'm listed as Mel Tenner," he said just before the door closed.

Oooh, that's creative, Belinda thought. Nobody would ever connect Mel Tanbridge with Mel Tenner. Idiot. She listened to the click of the latch and held her breath until she heard Mel's measured tread moving away from her door. "Shit," she whispered.

The room would be bugged, of course—Mel would have kept his options open, even if he had fully intended to kill her. "Do nothing irrevocable until the last possible moment," he'd told her more times than she cared to think about. "And always leave yourself an out—two, if you can." So he would have the room bugged, and he would now have someone keeping track of her movements.

What else? Threatening her family? Maybe—and if he tried it, he would find out how little that meant. Her lush of a mother wouldn't even notice a bullet between the eyes, her bastard stepfather deserved one, and if Mel's goons could locate her real father, who had skipped before she was even born, she hoped they'd make his life exciting. Threatening her, then? If she screwed up, she was dead. But she already knew that. She was dangerous to Mel—she just had to make sure she kept herself useful. Well, as long as she was the only one who knew who—and where—the little girl TK-wonder was, she was useful. And after that, she'd get out of his reach. Fast.

In the meantime, she hadn't seen the inside of her eyeballs in far too long. She double-locked the door, then stripped and eased herself between the cold sheets.

Life was giving her real cause to consider another line of work.

* * *

Andrew Kendrick sat in the kitchen, staring out the window at the policemen who wandered around his property accomplishing precious little. He was satisfied that they wouldn't find anything incriminating in the barn. There was nothing—absolutely nothing—left. How that could be, he didn't know, but the fact that it seemed impossible didn't in the least change the fact that it was true. And with the worry of discovery of his questionable activities behind him, he could relax a bit. And since they hadn't found the person responsible for destroying his barn, he wished the police would just get the hell off his property.

He would have to rebuild the barn. Rebuild the little windowless locking room, he thought. For the time being, the other barn would serve—but not as well. It had its private places, and its private times, but they were less frequent, and less convenient. Convenience had become important to him.

He could see Amanda and Sharon playing Barbie dolls in the den, doing something that was not meant for adult eyes and whispering with their heads leaned close together. He watched them without making it obvious that he was doing so—something had just occurred to him as he sat there. Amanda was growing up.

He sniffed with sudden distaste. Amanda had once been an enchanting child. She had been innocent and vulnerable and tractable. Now, as she sat next to the delicate and fragile Sharon, whose hair still tumbled loose in a five-year-old's baby ringlets, whose face was sweet and round and whose eyes were gentle and uncomprehending, Amanda was a gangling and ugly colt. She looked plain and scrawny, Andrew thought—and she looked hard. She had lost the childish innocence of Sharon. She seemed somehow adult, as she sat there making sly little comments while the two girls changed their dolls' clothes.

His attention was suddenly riveted by something his older daughter did. Amanda's face and mood had changed, and her eyes glittered green in the dim light. She tied the Barbie doll's wrists behind her back and placed the Ken doll behind her in a pose suggestive of—

Andrew's fingers tangled around the tablecloth in unconscious rage. He knew what Amanda was telling the little girl—he knew what she was showing her. Sharon was watching her older sister, fascinated, hanging intently on every word. Andrew couldn't hear the words hidden in the hushed whispers, but he knew anyway that she was exposing his secret—exposing him. And in the same burst of insight, he knew something else.

He knew that he was going to have to get rid of Amanda.

What she told to her little sister was of no real importance. Sharon wasn't old enough that any rational adult would take her seriously if she repeated what her sister said. Assuming she even understood half of what Amanda was telling her, or that she considered it anything other than a scary story. But Amanda could talk to adults as easily as she talked to the little girl. She could walk out the door and tell the police in his side yard what he had been doing—and what would come of that? Where would his law practice, with his high-powered corporate clients, be? Merryl would leave him, and worse, she would take Sharon with her—sweet, beautiful, obedient Sharon.

It would only be a matter of time until Amanda let something slip—he saw it coming with terrible clarity. He could see it in the crafty, loathsome eyes of the homely creature in the other room. He would have to get rid of her as soon as possible, in some way that would leave him completely above suspicion.

With the police department's newfound interest in his home, that was going to be damned difficult.

* * *

Dierdre felt the Gate pull in behind her, felt it drain her of some of her energy as she bore the brunt of the snap for both herself and Felouen. Felouen was near death. She hovered there, suspended over the chasm of nonexistence by the finest of gossamer threads.

Dierdre stood in the sacred grove of Elfhame Outremer, and felt the magic flow into her—magic she had cut herself off from voluntarily for a very long time. The great trees seemed to bend over her, welcoming her home, and their acceptance changed her subtly. She dropped her lighthearted human persona, her years of human acclimatization. She seemed to stretch, becoming something both more beautiful and more terrible than the human-seeming creature she had hidden herself in for all those many years. Her human colleagues, who had never seen the ancient elven noblewoman she truly was, would not have recognized her—and would have felt the strong compulsion to kneel and beg mercy in her presence for ever treating her with anything less than deepest respect.

She knelt next to her wounded comrade and gently rested her hands on the torn and broken body. A soft, golden glow gathered around her; a faint sheen that grew in glittering bands until she became the pale, lovely center of a brilliant light warmer than any homecoming. Her lips trembled just a little as she sang, over and over:

"Gathwaloür muelléiralra elearai ao;

Elearai, pallaiebaroa, ailoaüé houe.

Tué, atué escobeieada—

Tué, atué,

Tué, atué—tué."

The song was ancient, one of the oldest magics of the elvenkind—so old that its language was far removed from that spoken by the Seleighe Court. To a people whose lives stretched thousands of years, and whose language had not changed in tens of thousands of years, this made it a tongue of unimaginable age and power. Singing it, she gifted her strength and her health to Felouen. And as she sang, pain spread through her body, and Felouen's wounds healed under her fingers.

She kept singing until the pain blinded her and her voice faltered. She had no more strength to give—she could only take some of the damage to herself. Too much, and she would die in Felouen's place.

As her voice fell silent, though, another voice picked up the song, and other hands rested on Felouen's body. The Grove had felt her need and had summoned help. She fell back and lay in the soft velvet grass, and the Grove fed her and comforted her and promised her renewal.

She listened, unable to move, as the voices over Felouen changed; strong voices becoming weak, then being replaced by other strong voices, over and over. She felt like a child in her cradle again, rocked and safe, with others singing the old songs and whispering in the language of her childhood, the sounds familiar but the meaning of the words just out of the reach of her tired comprehension.

Homesickness, long foreign to her, overwhelmed her as she lay in the eternal twilight in the hallowed place between the worlds. The elven-tongue, so beautiful and long neglected by her, sang through her veins like hot brandy. Dierdre felt tears welling in her eyes, felt the uprush of repressed longing for a place and a way of life she had voluntarily forgone.

Homecoming—in such a way, with the death of one of her folk and the near-death of another riding her shoulders like a close-fitting cape—was bittersweet. The bitterness was only in the pain she brought with her from the low and dirty world of the humans, the unbearable sweetness in the touch of friends too long neglected, too long put aside.

Felouen would live. Her people had come to the call of the Grove, and her wounds had been shared by them.

And over Dierdre as well the elves began to sing, dispersing among themselves the agony that she had taken on alone when there was no one else to help her.

At last she was able to sit again, to hold her head upright, to look around her. She saw Felouen moving restlessly in the grass, her head tossing and her arms jolting out at intervals to stop the fall her mind would not release from present memory. Around her moved the beautiful folk in their flowing robes, their pale faces grave.

"Welcome home," said a rich, deep voice from behind her. "Too many years have you been apart from us, fair lady. Your home weeps in your absence."

Dierdre looked up and to one side. The elven lord had once been a friend and a comrade, had fought at her side under Dwylleth's leadership—and had been, with other friends, sadly neglected of late because of her other interests. "Yes," she said sadly. "I've been away a while."

She glanced around the Grove, and back up at her old friend, and touched his iridescent green robe. "But I'm home now."

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Framed

Title: | The Otherworld
Author: | Mercedes Lackey, Larry Dixon, Mark Shepherd & Holly Lisle
ISBN: | 0-671-57852-9
Copyright: | © 1992 by Mercedes Lackey
Publisher: | Baen Books