The Lost Prince Page 27

  “When will you know if your theory is right?” Cal asked.

  Lelani hesitated a moment, then added, “I can’t cast this spell from New York. Seth must do it in the vicinity of Dretch. I told you, about twenty miles.”

  “What? I can’t even kill salt,” Seth insisted. “Is there a spell to fill our gas tank without stopping instead?”

  “There is a spell to propel an inanimate vehicle, but that is far more difficult for someone at your skill level.”

  “Text him the information for the beacon, and be prepared to help him on the phone,” Cal ordered. “We’ll pull over at the next service area. Is Cat there?” he added.

  There was a moment’s pause and then Malcolm Robbe’s voice. “Cat just managed to put Bree down in the next room, Cal. She’s sound asleep next to her. Should I wake them?”

  “No—I’ll talk to her later,” Cal said. “Hopefully I’ll have good news in a few hours.” He reached over and cut the connection. “Save that phone battery,” he told Seth.

  Seth wished he were in a Waldorf Astoria bed protected by professional security. Still, there was something odd about the way Malcolm cut in on Lelani. Maybe he’d been the last to check in on Cat and Lelani didn’t know she was asleep. Maybe.

  3

  Seth had no idea the popular child’s toy Etch A Sketch contained aluminum powder. Nor did he realize that basic sparklers contained potassium percolate. Malcolm’s team researched what readily available items at the rest stop’s convenience store might contain the ingredients needed for the beacon spell. He bought a steel saucepan to put it all in and headed back to the darkened picnic area where he agreed to meet Cal. MacDonnell was paying the attendant for gas. Serious as he was already, Cal’s mood had noticeably changed for the worse when they left the interstate. They watched Dretch’s car drive on as they entered the rest area, almost hitting a Prius that had been backing out of its parking spot. They had maybe thirty minutes before Dretch was out of range.

  In the picnic area, Seth laid the items on a table. They were fortunate to be in a rural area with nearby campgrounds. The rest stops on the Jersey Turnpike would not have stocked portable propane cooking stands. As he lit the burner, he made a note to ask Lelani why some magic required elaborate ingredients and fire, and others could be cast with just a few words or the wave of a hand.

  Magic was fantastic and mysterious, but there were rules and limitations, their own version of the laws of physics. A wizard, Seth discovered, was a learned sorcerer … someone who studied both magic and science, honed their skill, and added to his or her natural abilities. Wizards could blend science and magic to create new, hybrid spells and enchantments. Any hag or bum with a natural inclination to magic could hang a shingle on their hovel and call himself a sorcerer. A wizard belonged to a recognized brotherhood. They were the Ph.D.s of the arcane, researching the depths of their power and the multiverse.

  “Well?” said Cal, impatiently. Seth didn’t even hear him bring the car up. He couldn’t remember the last time he concentrated so hard.

  “Everything’s set except for one ingredient. Gold. They didn’t have any real gold in the convenience store.”

  Cal took off his wedding ring and gazed at it for a precious few seconds. Then he threw it in the pot.

  What would he tell his wife?

  “If my ring is destroyed over a failed spell,” Cal said. “I will beat you to within an inch of your life.”

  “You really are an abusive fuck,” Seth responded.

  Before the exchange could go further, Lelani cleared her throat loudly on the speakerphone and asked to begin. Seth pricked his finger with his Swiss Army knife, and dropped blood into the pot. He recited the words she taught him, pictured the result he wanted in his mind, and dropped a match onto the flash powder. The powder ignited, a cloud of smoke rose from the pot. The ingredients—silver earrings, iron nails, wedding ring, and wishbone of a fowl for divining—were all singed. The two men looked around for some effect.

  “What’s happening?” said Lelani.

  “Nothing,” said Cal. “Not a damned thing.”

  “You may simply be too far from a lay line. Look for an area of great historical significance—a grand piece of architecture, the sight of a great battle, or significant cultural event. Magical energy inspires great deeds and draws these things to it.”

  Cal sat on the picnic bench, both hands balled into fists. He stared down the highway in the direction of Dretch’s escape.

  “Red, we’re in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere,” said Seth. “The whole world isn’t like New York.”

  Silence ensued. Seth thought about the phone’s battery life. He was about to sign off when Lelani asked, “Seth, have you finished your staff?”

  “Not the carving. I laid out the runes and am still trying to figure out the design motif. Kind of like picking out a tattoo.”

  “The runes are on the staff?” she asked excitedly.

  “Just penciled in. I didn’t get a chance to—”

  “Get your staff!”

  Seth retrieved it from the backseat. It was warm to the touch, as though he’d never relinquished it. As he reached the picnic table, he rested the bottom tip on the grass. A jolt ran through him—a tingling of energy, strange and yet familiar. Everything changed color. Living things—trees, insects, people, rodents—emitted an aura. The stars burned brighter and the black sky changed hue to the deep ultramarine of dusk. Inanimate objects were a cold sterile gray, their details lost and rendered irrelevant. Even the headlights on the cars and trucks looked drab compared to the aura of living things. Seth raised it off the grass and unplugged the effect. Everything was normal again.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “What happened?” asked Lelani.

  Seth explained.

  “Seth, Rosencrantz has been monitoring your progress. He’s reached out through the network of lay lines and the green, but until now had no way to connect with you.”

  “The green?”

  “The biosphere. Living things. When you tapped your staff on the grass, you connected with him. The staff is working. Cast the spell again.”

  Seth knew better than to argue. He could debate her for a day and still come away not understanding any of this. He used the remaining ingredients to pack a final wad of flash powder and placed it in the pot. He tapped the staff to the earth and his vision changed again. This time he listened and looked for signs from Rosencrantz. That familiar sensation grew in him again. It was like the time upstate when he held on to the tree and killed those gnolls and the undead guy. He repeated the steps for the beacon spell, this time more confident. An invisible force guided him, like a parent behind a running toddler. He lit the powder. This time the flash was more like a column of light shooting toward the heavens. He saw tendrils of warm light with golden flecks wafting around trees. They moved like a meandering autumn stream. Seth felt himself rise. He looked down to see his body still standing, eyes closed, staff in hand. Cal was saying something to him, but the sounds Seth now heard were not of the mortal world. He stopped rising when he reached the point of the highest tree. This, too, was Rosencrantz’s doing … the perspective of the top leaf. He could see for miles—and there, south of him, a bright light moved steadily on Interstate 85, tendrils of meandering light feeding lazily into it from the surrounding hills and forests.

  Seth willed himself down. He opened his eyes and unhitched himself from the green. Cal looked at him with a mixture of confusion, wonder, and hope.

  “To the Batmobile,” Seth said.

  CHAPTER 25

  CORPORATE AXMAN

  Mal went over his business reports with only half a mind. Catherine MacDonnell’s kidnapping weighed on his thoughts; it was an embarrassment. He’d promised to protect her—made a great deal about his wealth and resources, and then lost her to Dorn within a day. Then, to cover up his debacle, he lied to her husband. There would be a reckoning with the captain when the truth came out; he did not reli
sh the idea of reuniting with MacDonnell under these circumstances.

  The billionaire sat propped against pillows and the headboard scrolling through his laptop, responding to e-mails, delaying meetings, authorizing purchases, hiring new people, and getting rid of some dead weight that all companies accrue after years without a house cleaning. The latest economic difficulties made it easier to justify downsizing, especially those whose wages and benefits exceeded their productivity. The workers complained that the company made more than enough money to support their continued employment—as though the only reason for his company’s existence was to provide them work. Mal could never abide by that sort of backward thinking. He created his company from the ground up. Its purpose was to serve him, and the workers were there to serve his vision. When a body armor plant in Ohio threatened to form a union, Malcolm shuttered it and moved the jobs to West Virginia. A bunch of Appalachians could sew ceramic plates into Kevlar as good as anyone in Ohio, and seemed a hell of a lot more appreciative for the chance.

  Someone knocked on the bedroom door. Its immediate opening told Mal that Scott had returned, even before his partner came into view. Everyone else would have waited for his permission before entering.

  With his great success, Mal had developed some understanding of the rules of nobility. What was he if not a modern aristocrat, after all, even if he didn’t have fancy titles. Everyone wants a piece of the man who’s in charge. If it wasn’t money, it was favors, some boon, some judgment, some advantage—some little piece of the power he held. The rules were there to keep everyone from rushing forward all at once like a pack of wild dogs barking and nipping at his fingers. Scott was different. He was Mal’s kennel master, adept at the game and with a personal interest in protecting Malcolm’s privacy, since it was also his own.

  Scott carried two stacked boxes, one large, one smaller, that he placed on the end of the bed.

  “These just arrived from the Forge,” he said, rubbing his arms to soothe his sore muscles. “What is it … gold bullion?”

  The Forge was Malcolm’s research center, where his company tested new alloys and designs to build the weapons that supplied America’s armed forces. Malcolm wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill chief executive—one of those sons of paper pushers from Ivy League frats with cushy corner offices and stock options and golden parachutes and no vested interest in the company’s success. Mal had practical skills. Like his hero Soichiro Honda, who could take apart and rebuild his cars’ engines by himself, Mal knew how to smelt, blend, and bend metal—he always had, even when he didn’t know who he really was. You could make a dwarv forget his name, but you could never get the forge out of his blood.

  Mal set aside the laptop on a pillow and stood to examine the boxes. The larger box was five feet long, three feet wide, and two feet thick. He ripped off the brown paper wrapping and pulled off the cardboard top. Resting inside Styrofoam molds were three sections of a beautifully designed two-sided metal ax.

  The ax head was one solid piece of forged stainless steel with two gleaming silver curving blades a foot apart on either end. From the razor-sharp ends it thickened to a smooth five-inch bulge in the center and was topped with a six-inch Kaiser spike shooting up from the ax eye. Underneath was the hole for the handle attachment. The silver handle segments were solid inch-and-a-half-wide cylinders forged from aircraft grade 6.6.2 titanium alloy, grooved the long way with intermittent dwarv design motifs that Malcolm had provided. The valleys of the grooves and etchings were tinted black, making the embossed silver parts of the handle shine brighter by comparison. The design was more for grip than decoration, but there was no reason it couldn’t look impressive, too. Just past the thinner throat of the handle end it swelled into a spherical knob. A leather loop strap was anchored into the knob end.

  Mal pulled out the sections and began assembling with the eagerness of a young boy on Christmas morning. He inserted the first handle segment into the head and twisted to hear a satisfying and sturdy click. Then he attached the second half of the handle and it clicked solidly into place. Mal felt the weight, its reach, and balance before resting the weapon vertically on the floor. From ground to head, it was four feet high with six extra inches for the spike.

  Scott whistled. “The boys do good work.”

  “And fast,” Malcolm said. “I only gave them the specs two days ago.”

  “Why not titanium all the way through?” Scott asked. “That head looks heavy.”

  “Titanium blade wouldn’t last as long as the steel, and you want weight at the head. Helps drive through bone and muscle.”

  Scott was visibly alarmed by the remark. “Really?” he said. “Exactly whose bones do you plan to drive this monstrosity through?”

  Mal opened the second box and it also contained an ax, similar to the first, only half the size and completely solid steel.

  “Did you not notice one of our party was kidnapped today?” Mal said. He laid the big ax against the wall by the headboard, pushed the boxes off the bed and resumed his work position with the laptop.

  Scott poured himself a glass of lemon water at the wetbar. “Cat’s kidnapping is eating everyone up,” Scott said. “Lelani is beside herself. And Collins … he’d been friends with most of our security team for years.”

  “You think talking about my feelings will somehow be better than trying to get work done?” Malcolm said, typing away. The monitor’s glow tinted him a frosty blue, adding to his coldness.

  “I think not beating yourself up for something you could not have predicted would be a good start.” Scott sat beside Malcolm on the bed and placed a hand on his lap. Mal looked up; he gazed into the face of the man who’d been his partner in every way for the past several years, a man he knew like the back of his hand. Scott thought he knew Malcolm as well, but that was the old Mal—the one who thought he was of this universe. New Mal was a conglomeration of two lives.

  “I sent one security man with them to the only source of magical energy on the entire island of Manhattan,” Malcolm said. “How much more stupid could I have been to not anticipate the possibility of an ambush? Even just a random meeting. From the start I should have sent an entire detachment of guards to secure the lay pool and left them there to keep Dorn’s cronies away from the very power they need to vex us.

  “I’m very good at secular strategies, Scott. But I’ve been away from Aandor for so long, I had forgotten how to factor wizards into a fight. Dealing with people who can manipulate the laws of nature with a gesture and a wave will put gray hairs on any soldier’s head. We need to be smarter, Scott. This is very serious stuff. We need to be smarter if we’re to get home alive.”

  “But I am home,” Scott said, quite solemnly.

  Malcolm remained quiet, surprised at his own slip of the tongue. He didn’t know yet how to address this issue. It had been the elephant in the room for a few days now. The problem was, Malcolm wasn’t sure of his own feelings on the subject yet. He had skin in the game in both universes and was torn between staying and going back.

  “This is not my home,” Malcolm said. “It’s a beautiful life and I’ve accomplished much, but I came here for a specific purpose.” Mal put the laptop down again and faced his partner.

  “I love my village. I love our culture, our cuisine, our work ethic—the songs we sang, the things we built. I miss my home. When the invasion came, I didn’t just run away like half the other members in our party. I knew my purpose was to protect that kid as though my people’s very future depended on it. My people are there.”

  “I’m your people, too,” said Scott, trying to keep the pain out of his voice. These revelations had placed a tremendous amount of strain on him. It was hard for Malcolm to hear. Scott really had been his “people” for years, the only friend Mal needed to have a happy life. They had been talking about adopting a child, and perhaps more after that to check off the last remaining requirements of domestic bliss.

  Mal knew this conversation was inevitable. Part of be
ing successful in business was the ability to predict events. He already had a sense of the way it might go, and he didn’t want to face it.

  “I have two children,” Mal said. “A son, Axel, who’s fourteen, and my daughter Mathilde, nine. Both haven’t even realized yet their pa has lived without them for thirteen years.”

  Scott would understand the burden of that responsibility. He had two daughters from a previous marriage that had been a lie from the start, prompted by his southern roots to fit in. Mal liked Scott’s ex very much. She was educated and open-minded and had been a good sport about it all. Scott’s coming out had been a relief to her after years of feeling like she wasn’t attractive enough to retain his interests. She simply didn’t have what turned him on. The girls, Molly and Claire, lived with their mother in Virginia Beach, but Mal and Scott had them up to the Hamptons often for holidays and summer vacation. Scott was a phenomenal father, made possible by his personal happiness in finally living the life he was born to live.

  “And where there’s children, there is usually a wife,” Scott said softly, more for his own realization.

  “There is a wife. But she’s not as important as you might assume. It was an arranged marriage … a normal custom among my people. We like each other, get on very well, but there was never passion, romance—never a connection of the kind we have.”

  “Have? Do you still have it, Malcolm? That old queen Balzac couldn’t keep his mouth shut about how much dwarv women look like men. Told the others you were confused about your orientation.”

  “Cruz doesn’t know shit about my feelings!” Mal’s ire rose. The complications of the guardians’ lives were bad enough without some effete fool mouthing off his toxic gossip. Balzac was the reason Catherine MacDonnell ended up in Central Park … because he couldn’t keep his hole shut about MacDonnell’s betrothed in Aandor.

  “Yes, our women are more masculine,” Mal said. “When the restoration spell hit, I was afraid … worried that knowing my true self again, my feelings for you would wane. I waited and waited for that moment when I would no longer find you—attractive.