The Lost Prince Read online

  Luanne’s anger emanated quietly through the receiver. Now she felt cheap instead of heroic—stupid for selling more of the farm than she needed to. God help him if any of this got back to Bev.

  “Honey,” he said softly. “You did fine. You helped out your uncle Cole here. You don’t know how important you are to me at the moment. My life is on the line here.”

  “Yeah?” she said, just above a whisper.

  “Definitely. When I get back I’m going to make it ten thousand. For giving it a hundred and ten percent on this one.”

  Colby cringed and pumped his fist quietly into the glazed brick wall, realizing a second too late that throwing more money to alleviate his guilt only elevated Luanne to a higher class of prostitute. What was wrong with him?

  “Well…,” she said, sounding less upset. “It was my choice. He’s actually not bad … Uh, guy that is … he’s not a bad guy. But you might want to get back here soon. Cody ain’t none too happy about Daniel being here.”

  “Who’s Cody?”

  “My boyfriend. He was with his buds by the general store the day you drove into the trailer park with Daniel. The guy with the Cadillac DeVille.”

  “Jeezus H. Roosevelt Christ, Luanne! The meth heads? Your boyfriend’s a dealer?”

  “He’s a mechanic at the bowling alley, Uncle Cole. He does the other stuff for extra money.”

  That’s all Colby needed—for Daniel to end up captured in a police raid on the trailer park. Or worse, shot in a love triangle over his niece’s well-traveled cooch.

  “Honey, keep Daniel away from Cody. Don’t even let them talk. I’ll be back by morning.”

  Colby hung up the phone before anything his niece could say would make him madder than he already was. He was severely depressed … over Luanne, over two-timing Dorn, over the fact that he would have sold out a good kid to get his heart back. He tried to make a joke of it and convince himself he at least got the kid laid, but it fell flat on the brain. Thirteen was too young. Would it leave emotional scars? He had to get back to North Carolina as fast as possible and put Daniel into MacDonnell’s hands. There he would be safest. There wasn’t any more time for finesse.

  He climbed to the second landing of the motor lodge wondering where his life had gone wrong and how much worse it could get. The shades of the room fluttered at his knock. The door opened just enough to admit him and closed quickly behind him. Krebe, Hommar, and a man almost as big and ugly as Hesz with long black hair stood around in the dimly lit room staring at him like he was under a spotlight. Colby had no misunderstanding of what this meeting was … an interrogation. The room had the feel of a tomb. The faint smell of something dead slowly crept into his senses.

  Colby clamped down on his rising concerns and put up a strong front. “I thought Hesz was coming down,” he said coolly.

  “He returns to New York with a gift for Dorn,” said Krebe.

  They stood looking at each other for several seconds.

  “You asked to meet,” Colby reminded them. “Every moment I’m here is time I’m not searching for the kid.”

  “How much longer?” Krebe asked him point blank.

  “Look … I found him once. But it’s not my fault he took off to God knows where. Murdering his dad and running off had nothing to do with us. Just bad timing is all. Dorn has to understand … these events would have occurred regardless of whether we were looking for him or not. If you’d only come to me a day earlier—”

  “Dorn does not believe in coincidence,” Krebe interjected.

  “Facts are facts. What else can I tell you?”

  “Too many coincidences,” said Todgarten in a baritone laced with rolling gravel. “At times, you are completely untraceable. Your use of pay phones instead of our generously supplied device is suspect, as is travel by means other than your own vehicle. We will remain with you while you track the prince.”

  “That’s out of the question,” said Dretch. His concern was turning to fear, and he stomped down hard and sat on it. “I can’t work effectively with the circus tailing me,” he explained in his most businesslike voice.

  “Do not mistake this for a request.” Todgarten swung a thumping velvet sack before Colby’s face, taunting him.

  His heart was here, with them?

  Todgarten meant to intimidate him with the wayward organ, but it had the opposite effect. His heart within reach instead of in New York and with MacDonnell nearby—this was the break Colby had been praying for. Dorn’s promises of restoration were empty and as long as he held on to Colby’s heart, he could kill the detective at a whim. But if Colby took back possession of it, Dorn’s hold over him stopped—or at the very least diminished. Colby wouldn’t constantly wonder if each step he took would be his last—if he’d just fall down dead with no warning.

  Todgarten removed the heart from its sack and squeezed it with his massive hand. An invisible pressure gripped Colby’s chest. Though he hadn’t drawn a true breath in days, only now did he feel as though he couldn’t breathe. Colby grasped at his chest.

  “We will eventually find the prince through other means,” Todgarten continued … his deep voice rumbling like a coming storm. “Now that we know his name and where he’s resided these many years, the era of your usefulness draws to a close. You want to find the boy first, Detective, if you wish to be reacquainted with your organ.”

  “They—might—never—find…” Colby succumbed to the pain and fell to his knees clutching his chest with both hands.

  “But they will,” Krebe said, crouching down to look him in the eye. “Lord Dorn has anonymously placed sixty thousand dollars at the disposal of the Baltimore area police departments as a cash reward for any information leading to Daniel’s capture. We’re going viral. The prince’s face even now is being uploaded to Web sites, tacked on telephone poles and billboards within a hundred miles of Baltimore. It’s sure to garner interest from the mainstream media as well. In these economic times, who would choose friendship with a father killer over money?”

  Colby collapsed onto his back like a Raid-zapped roach, suffocating as the three of them hovered over him with only mild interest. He tried to get the word “yes” out of his throat but emitted only an impression of a smoker’s hack. He nodded his head vigorously. Todgarten released the pressure on his heart and Colby could “breathe” again, if that was the right description for one of the living dead.

  He needed to buy time. There had to be a way to delay this group so that he could get word to MacDonnell. Colby felt better almost immediately, but played his resuscitation down. He sat on the bed hunched over his knees and made a display of drawing breath. He fiddled with his collar and tie and said, “I have a lead. You can come, but the interviews I do alone. You’ll only spook the hell out of people.”

  “You have twenty-four hours to produce a tangible result,” said Krebe. His tone implied consequences.

  “You’re a bunch of sorcerers,” Colby pointed out. “If it’s so damn easy, why haven’t you conjured him up already?”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Krebe repeated, calmly—methodically.

  The detective narrowed his eyes, keenly observing the Jack-the-Ripper impressionist. “You’re not Krebe, are you?” he said. “You’re the other one.”

  Krebe/Oulfsan smiled and gave the detective a courteous bow. His cell phone rang. Dorn had called from New York. They spoke for a moment and Krebe held the phone up and shook it at the detective, prompting Colby to get off the bed and take it. What more could they say to him?… He got the message: Daniel or die. Dorn spoke to Colby in dulcet tones like a paramour prodding a potential lover. Then a second voice that could not possibly be came on the line. The next sound was the most painful thing Colby ever heard. Colby Dretch dropped to his knees—the phone slipped out of his hand onto the carpet. He pounded the carpet in despair and wept nonexistent tears, cursing his parched dead eyes for all they’d ever seen.

  CHAPTER 24

  SETH GOES GREEN

 
1

  Seth and Cal sat in the car in an adjacent parking lot to the motor lodge. Colby’s car was in view and they watched him enter the room on the second floor. It was the first time since the battle in upstate New York that they had been within fifty yards of the enemy—the real enemy, not some hapless thrall. Some decorative pine bushes that marked the boundaries of the two properties conveniently shielded their SUV. Seth whittled his staff.

  The agreed-upon plan was to meet at a nearby coffee shop, but Cal refused to let the detective out of their sight from here on in. The man’s ethics were questionable and the stakes were too high. Colby had used the office payphone to make a call before going into the motel room. Seth knew Cal wanted to trace that call, but they were without resources. Cal had been ordered by his bosses not to take any cases in his capacity as a New York police officer. He was on bereavement leave due to the death of his partner. They expected him to go to church or counseling or just stay home with his family.

  Seth found whittling to be soothing—a focus for his anxiety and excess energy. But more than that, with each cut and notch, the sense of calm grew within him. His walkabout in New York before they’d left had started the feeling off. He’d made excellent progress atoning for past misdeeds before Cal dragged him off to Maryland (quite literally). Each action of his that he took full responsibility for literally felt like psychic masonry—as though he were bricking up a large black hole at the core of his being. If only he’d had time for the last and most important transgression of all.

  Seth had his car seat set back all the way and reclined a bit to make room for the staff. The bottom tip rested on the passenger-side floor and the top barely cleared the car roof just behind him; like holding an exotic orchestra instrument, only instead of playing it, he was creating one. He had started this task in upstate New York the way he did all challenges—resentment toward work, a negative mind-set, and a belief that he could not accomplish this with any proficiency. Seth could not have been more wrong. From the very beginning, a deep urge forced him to assert himself. He rejected the branch Lelani had originally handed him in that parking lot in favor of another one deep in the bundle on the car roof. He didn’t know the right word to explain what made him pick that particular branch: Polarity? Resonance? Vibe? Something about that stick felt “righter” than the others. Lelani arched an eyebrow when he made the request, causing him to suspect the whole thing was a made-up task to distract him from his cigarette cravings. But he listened intently to her instruction, and as he progressed, was sure this was something he was meant to do.

  Seth had skinned the outer layer of bark from the stick with a short stout blade, cutting down knots and nubs and reducing its thickness to a respectable two inches. Using a modified paint scraper to shave off a second green layer, he then shaved down the flat edges left by the scraper with a Flexcut rounded edge, smoothing out the knots as well. By the time he was down to the white wood, it was six feet long and one and three-quarter inches thick.

  There was a slight curve in the middle of the staff, and the wood was heavy with moisture. Branches normally took weeks to dry out, but Lelani used a spell to speed the process. They dipped the tips of the staff in candle wax to protect it from cracking and checking. Seth had sat with a large flat cutting board leaning on his shins and held the staff against it like he would a cello. He’d had an overprotective feeling of the staff and was nervous about cracking or splintering when Lelani infused the wood with a magical dry heat while Seth placed pressure on the curved parts of the stick to straighten it out. A great weight lifted from him when they succeeded, like watching your six-year-old do well in his first ball game. The straightened staff was lighter, having lost its water weight, and gained an inch in height. The white wood was hard and had a beautiful musical resonance when tapped on. Seth used a square of ultrafine grain sandpaper to smooth it out.

  To protect the tips from checking, he whittled a series of cuts around the edge of the tips at thirty-degree angles—the slopes of the cuts met at an imaginary apex a few inches above the end of the staff. Then he added another series of cuts above the first ones. Seth repeated this until a makeshift rounding out of the edge emerged. He took the sandpaper to the edges, but was careful not to eliminate all traces of the original facets. The staff was now prepped for its design elements.

  Lelani had lent Seth her whittling portfolio—soft calf leather that folded upon itself and was tied closed by a leather strip. When he opened it, the carving tools lay neatly in their own leather pockets. The tools themselves were well maintained, made of iron or steel with bone and wood handles. Seth could tell the set held some sentimental value by Lelani’s hesitation to relinquish it. She had written for Seth on a piece of parchment a series of runes that he was to carve into the staff. A second series of runes lay at the bottom; he was to choose four among those options with no guidance from her. They represented wisdom, intelligence, strength, speed, love, power, war, peace, air, earth, fire, water, black, gray, white, life, death, chaos, order, and balance. Any design motifs or illustrations were up to him, provided they did not break the connection between the first set of runes at the top of the page. While he pondered the finality of his choices, he whittled a hand-sized grip of small concentric circles, like a snake’s rattle, around the five-foot mark of the staff. He thought of Ben as he whittled, each notch scooping away something black in his soul, like picking clumps of tar off a golden statue.

  “What the hell…,” Cal said beside him.

  Seth looked up to see Colby Dretch and three of Dorn’s men leaving the hotel room. They piled into his car with Dretch at the wheel.

  “You were right,” Seth said. “He’s double-crossing us.”

  “No,” Cal said. “Something’s wrong.” He started the car and followed them out of the lot.

  Colby hit Interstate 95 heading south. Cal was quiet with a worried expression.

  “You think they’re heading for the prince,” said Seth. Cal didn’t say anything, but glanced at his fuel gauge. They had half a tank—barely enough to make North Carolina. If Colby’s car had a full tank, it could outdistance them before they’d have time to refill. Seth dialed Lelani on his cell. He explained the situation. She had no easy solution, but said she’d get back to him. Seth continued to work on his staff well into Virginia.

  2

  Seth was having bad dreams. All the people he hurt in his life had been turned into the heartless living dead, and they were all after his brains. Half of them were naked girls—girls he’d photographed, strung out on heroin, cocaine, or worse. He wasn’t ungrateful when Cal rudely nudged him awake. “You talk in your sleep,” he said, and then continued to drive quietly.

  The staff rested against his shoulder in the same position as when he dozed off working on it. He had penciled in the runes. The first set of runes from the parchment he ran vertically, two on the north and south sides of the staff above the grip, two on the east and west sides of the staff below it, careful not to break the sentence structure Lelani indicated. He left space just above the handgrip for the four runes of his choice. Those he would place on the same level horizontally in a circle around the staff. He didn’t know which rune meant what. Lelani said that was part of the bond between a spell caster and his instrument. The first set of runes represented what he intended for the staff. The second set of symbols were different from the first and traditionally taught to wizards after they’d created their first staff or walking stick. The wizard chose them blindly because it allowed the universe to communicate its purpose for the spell caster—that there was a place for the magic user within the universal architecture. Lelani said the choice would feel random; all the runes would be calling to him, but he would connect with the ones that matched him best. It was a ritual steeped more in tradition than fact, but many swore by it, insisting the universe was never wrong. Seth figured it was like reading horoscopes … everyone sees their life in the prediction.

  They had switched to Interstate 85
around Petersburg, Virginia. Outside the car it was dark. The world blended into blue and gray uniformity. “Where are we?” Seth asked.

  “Near the Carolina border,” Cal said. The fuel gauge indicated low. They’d soon be driving on fumes. “Call her.”

  “Call her,” had become Callum’s new mantra. Could he be any more clear that he’d rather have had Lelani on this trip? He left her behind to organize the remnants of the prince’s guardians, and coincidentally, she was in a position to protect Cat and Bree. As driven as the cop was to find the prince, he had two duties, really—the other being the protection of his family. To Callum, divided loyalties must be as alien as altruism was to the mafia. Seth chuckled at the likelihood of Dominic Tagliatore opening libraries and orphanages with his ill-gotten gains.

  Lelani picked up on the third ring. Seth put her on speaker so that Cal could hear.

  “I have a theory,” she said. “This would never work in Aandor because of the abundance of magical energies in the environment, but—to remain animated, Dretch must be drawing power from the sparse lay lines in this reality. Otherwise he would just be another corpse. The spell that animates him requires a constant stream of mana. He’s drawing it to him. In fact, if he should ever stray too far from any lay lines, he would shut down.

  “We might be able to make the energy visible. There are virtually no other spells or enchantments in this reality—nothing to compete with the energy flowing toward Dretch. As long as you stayed within twenty miles or so of him, you could use the mana as a beacon. You’ll need some items for the spell though—metals sensitive to magic such as iron, silver, and gold; potassium percolate, aluminum powder, blood, and a few other items.”