He could hear that Lucien was ordering his less trusted people away from the buildings on the pretense of setting up a secure perimeter. It meant that the casting circle was intact and Lucien wanted the freedom to inscribe the spell without a mask.
Tristan made sure the table was dry and shifted one of the benches into the sunlight streaming through a set of arrow slits. He sat down, slid up his mask, and opened the leather messenger bag to see what had Lucien handed him.
Lucien had given Tristan information to use in finding his beloved: Carla Marie “Boo” Kryskill.
Their ancient father didn’t trust human technology, not so much because he thought it was temperamental, but because it was transitory. During their father’s life on Earth, the language of the educated had changed from Greek to Latin to English. He’d lived through the rise and fall of printed newspapers. He’d recently lamented that even handwriting was falling out of use. He’d urged his sons not to get dependent on anything more complex than a pen and paper. It had been advice that Tristan ignored on Earth. He saw no point of not using all the human tools available to accomplish the impossible tasks that his father gave him. Lucien walked a fine line between the two.
The contents of the messenger bag reflected Lucien’s balanced approach. There was a thick folder of paper and an iPad. Tristan flipped quickly through the folder. It contained newspaper clippings about the Kryskill family and an odd collection of handwritten notes. Tristan ignored the paper in favor of the tablet. The iPad had hundreds of photographs and videos.
Lucien had kidnapped Boo when the girl was in first grade. Her white-blond hair reminded Tristan of their half sisters, the Eyes, when they were little. They had been sweet children, once upon a time. Boo’s hair started to darken to gold as the girl grew older but suddenly returned to its pure white state. Tristan suspected that Lucien had done something to “fix” her hair. It would have needed a deft touch, as spell-working on a child was a delicate procedure.
Lucien liked dressing Boo in white gowns for a look that was filled with ethereal innocence. He must have had the dresses all handsewn for her out of delicate, gauze-like fabrics. He liked to crown her with little bright flowers woven into rings, usually out of blue and yellow. There was always one red note in her outfits, like a splotch of blood on the pure white. It was a disturbing detail, which could not be unseen once Tristan had noticed it.
In the earliest videos, the girl had looked at the camera with wide-eyed fear. The look softened over the years to something that could be sweetness. After Lucien transformed the girl into a tengu female, though, she glared at the lens in rage.
“You have a mountain to climb there, brother, if you want to win that heart.”
Beyond Lucien’s home movies, there were a lot of other videos to weed through — a majority of them were local TV shows and news broadcasts, most from eight years ago. Tristan skipped them, suddenly aware he’d spent over an hour watching the videos. There didn’t seem to be anything else saved on the iPad. He reluctantly opened the thick folder. As he sorted through the paper within it, he wondered about his brother’s motivation.
Lucien had tweaked Boo’s hair color when she was eight or nine. He allowed the girl to age to sexual maturity before making her immortal. Boo had the tengu crow feet, but had retained her pure white coloring. Lucien had gotten very good at transformational spellcasting. What Lucien had done to the girl had been a mix of fetish and need. Where did one stop and the other begin? When Tristan captured Boo, would Lucien leave her as a tengu or did he plan to quietly make her an elf later?
Did Lucien plan to make himself pure elf?
Lucien was maturing faster than Tristan, despite the fact that Tristan had spent the last two decades on magic-poor Earth instead of Elfhome. It seemed to indicate that while Lucien would be extremely long lived, chances were good that he would not be immortal. If Lucien could so easily change his beloved from human to tengu, going from half-elf to full elf would be a minor tweak in comparison. Knowing his brother, Lucien probably planned to “fix” both of them once they reached full maturity.
Did Tristan want to be full elf? He gained no benefits from being half-human. His humanity, though, was all he had left of his mother. She had been past her prime when he was born. He’d known for years that any visit with her might be the last one. He hadn’t wanted to come to Elfhome, afraid that she might die alone while all her remaining children were stuck on another planet.
He pushed aside the morbid thoughts and the ache that they caused within his heart.
He’d divided the papers into several piles. The largest was an unruly mass of old newspaper clippings. Boo’s disappearance had been headline news. The search for her had taken up full pages, and then, as time went by, several columns, and finally just small paragraphs.
“These are useless,” Tristan muttered as he set them aside. The clippings were ancient history. He’d only resort to them if he hit an utter dead end.
Here was a surprise. Lucien had communicated with Chloe via email. He’d asked simply, “Where is she?” It was a safe enough question, the vagueness itself a code. Chloe had printed out the email and wrote her reply by hand, a dutiful daughter to a technophobe father.
“Little Taipan,” Chloe had written in her beautiful, well-practiced script, “taking a doll and turning it inside out renders it invisible. There’s a hole in its heart where you used to reside. Eyes that were turned inward look out beyond itself. The landscape it considers is alien to me. By your hand, I am unable to help.”
Taipan was Earth’s deadliest snake. It was at once a riff on Lucien’s oni name and an insult as it underscored Lucien’s connection to Earth as half-human. “Little” was a sneer at how short the brothers were compared to their younger sisters. Chloe — and perhaps the others — hadn’t realized that their height and apparent age were proof that Father had done something to the girls to make them more human than their older brothers.
That was Chloe for you. Poor, dead, snarky Chloe.
His father’s servants had tried to explain the abilities of a trained seer. They were going by what they knew from several thousand years before when his father had an entire stable of well-groomed intanyai seyosa. They were hampered by the fact that none of them had the capability to see the future, so it was much like blind people trying to explain moonlight. According to them, a seer’s ability worked strongest with someone who was closely associated with them. It was the reason his father married his mother instead of just working with her as a business partner.
What Chloe must have meant was that by making Boo a tengu, Lucien had utterly changed how Boo saw the world. It wiped clean all the connections Chloe had with Boo through Lucien. The other Eyes would be equally hampered.
The date on the email caught Tristan’s eye. It was shortly after Tristan arrived on Elfhome with their father. That explained much. Lucien had lost his beloved just as he’d gone from the voice of god to their father’s second oldest son. While Lucien was still the main war commander, he could no longer move troops without answering to a higher authority. Since today was the first time Tristan had heard tell of Boo, Lucien must have removed all mentions of her from the official reports. Tristan could guess why — their father would consider Lucien’s fixation on the girl as a threat to their success. The Eyes had, hence the entire reason Lucien had needed to transform Boo into a tengu of the Chosen bloodline.
Tristan flipped through the handwritten notes in Lucien’s sloppy schoolboy writing. Judging by the condition of the paper they were written on, most of them seemed to have been made years ago, as if Lucien realized early on that he couldn’t keep Boo a prisoner for eternity. Perhaps he’d planned to give her more freedom after he was sure that she would freely return to him. He had summaries of every member of Boo’s extended family. Grandparents. Parents. Siblings. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. As Tristan scanned the notes, he couldn’t help but shake his head. Lucien couldn’t have found a worse set of people to steal a baby girl from. The Kryskills were a large, well-connected, heavily armed family with a colorful history on both sides of the law.