My cell chimed. Beast and I followed Eli to my gobag in the mudroom, the small bag hanging on the rack with other winter gear. He swiped the screen, tapped in my security code, and started back to the office, saying, “Molly, it’s Eli—”
Angie Baby screamed, “My Eddie is in trouble! My Eddie! No! No!”
Beast growled, showing killing teeth. My/our heart did a fearful, arrhythmic bump-and-pause, and then raced too fast. Again, I searched for the connection to Edmund. Gone. Severed. As if it had been cut out with a knife. It was a strange sensation, as if a part of my own body had been instantly amputated and I kept searching for it, feeling something but . . . not the missing part. Ed was mine. Ed was gone.
Molly’s voice came over the phone and my attention swept to the cell. “Sorry, Jane. Angie woke up screaming from a bad dream about Ed. We’ve been trying to calm her down, but she grabbed my cell and called.” In the background, we heard the sound of Angie Baby’s screams diminish in volume and the crooning of her father’s flute magic, soothing her.
“Eli here. Jane’s big-cat at the moment. Angie may not be having a dream.”
“What’s happening with Ed?” Molly asked, a trace of fear in her tone.
“We don’t know, except that Jane heard Ed through the vamp-binding. Alex is searching for him.”
In the background Angie’s screams crescendoed, the pitch so high it hurt Beast’s ears. She turned her ear tabs down against the noise and thought, Kits . . . Kits in trouble. Ed in trouble.
“Eli, I—This is . . . Has Ed been killed? He and Angie have a blood bond. I don’t know what to do if . . . ?” Molly’s voice trailed away, uncertainly.
I/we nodded Beast’s head up and down, then back and forth, an uncertain yes/no gesture. We stared at Eli, snarling and licking our jaw, hoping he would understand that this was really not right.
“Jane and Beast are upset too,” he said.
“I think we’ll come visit,” Molly said.
“We have the room,” Eli said.
“Yeah. I’ve seen the sales brochures,” she said wryly.
In the background, the screaming stopped. Evan said, “She’s asleep. Pack fast. More snow is coming.”
Into the cell, Molly said, “We’ll probably have to keep her in magically induced sleep, but expect us after nine tonight.”
“The county brined the street but the drive is frozen,” Eli said. “Call if you get stuck.”
“Will do.” The call ended.
From the office, I heard the Kid’s voice in quiet conversation with Grégoire, Blondie’s and Alex’s voices barely loud enough to pick out, even with Beast’s ears. Grégoire was in France with Edmund. Good. That meant up-to-date info. I/we trotted to him.
“Send me everything you have,” Alex said.
“Oui. My people do so now. Dieu vous garde en sécurité.”
“You too, dude.”
I heard a connection end and felt a smile tug at my puma lips. Only Alex would call a royal-born, centuries-old, powerful vamp dude.
“Do the Everhart-Truebloods know how sick you are?” Eli asked me as we reentered the office.
Beast snorted. Louder, Alex said, “Yeah. They know.” The younger Younger had been putting out the word, asking about magical treatments or cures for magical cancers. That meant talking to witches and revealing everything to Molly, my BFF, and her husband, air witch Big Evan. Witch boy children got magic-induced cancers often. Fighting the cancers meant a lot of study had gone into the magical and mundane cures. However, I wasn’t a witch. My cancer was different.
Molly had mostly given up on finding a cure for me. She wanted me to drink a lot of vampire blood and cross my fingers that the healing of vamps would work on me. The only problem with that cancer treatment was that Ed was my first choice, my only safe choice, and he was in Europe. Any other vamp would see how sick I am and might challenge me to a blood duel on the spot to get my lands. And besides. I knew in my heart, no amount of vamp blood was going to heal me. My DNA had doubled, folded, multiplied, shredded, and knotted itself when I bubbled time. Vamp blood wasn’t going to fix that.
My partners and I had been looking for a permanent cure. I wasn’t dead. Yet. We still had options. Sort of.
Eli placed my cell phone on the big desk. His face was intent, the expression he wore when he was strategizing, ideas coming, undergoing scrutiny, being filed or discarded. To Alex, he said, “Yeah. Okay. We can do this. A house full of magic-using kids.” He smiled slightly as if he was anticipating it. “This will be interesting.”
Alex tapped keys, scanned screens, grunted, and swiveled to us. “I got something,” he said.
Beast and I sat beside his chair and wrapped her long tail around our feet. The tail was warm with strong blood flow, thick, deeply furred, heavy, and cozy on our paws.
Alex leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees. That made us eye-to-eye level and brought his scent strongly to our nose. He smelled of testosterone and garlic and coffee and aftershave and worry. Beast butted his hands, which were laced and hanging between his knees in a posture that was very Eli-like. Alex’s mouth twisted into a parody of a smile and he scratched Beast behind her ears. “I’ve been in FaceTime conversation with Grégoire. Things have been happening fast in France, and there’re things Grégoire hasn’t told us, not wanting to worry you.”
Beast snarled. So did I. Blondie knew I was sick. Blondie had been keeping secrets.
“Ed,” Alex said gently, scratching, smoothing our lips back over our teeth. He looked into our eyes as if he was about to break my heart, “Was stolen from his lair in France at midday, five days ago.”
My heart stuttered.
Ed? Beast asked.
Eli’s lips twitched. On another man it would have been a scowl like thunderclouds. “We weren’t notified,” Eli said. “Why?”
“There was a fight,” Alex said, even more gently, “in a farmhouse in the wine country of France. Four of Ed’s people were killed. The house where they were laired burned to the ground.”
Ed? Our lips moved but no sound came out. Our eyes burned. But Alex didn’t appear to be grieved or as if he was about to tell me—
“His surviving people thought Ed had burrowed under the hearth, into a small safe-room lair, with three others. His vamps had been sharing blood and so they knew he was alive, but that was all they knew until they got the safe room excavated.” Alex sounded so grown up. So adult. So much like Eli in his delivery, but with his own touch, that gentleness I would never have expected when I first met him. His fingers scratched deep and Beast closed our eyes in bliss. “Because of the heat of the fire and the presence of the local law,” he said, “that rescue took place only a few hours past. Ed wasn’t in the safe room. Grégoire now assumes that Ed was taken by the attackers the day of the assault.”