Am at 1132 North Bretton. There are two groups of sidhe who are both competing and working together. The halfling has taken me and Sean Friar hostage. She will trade me to Robert Friar. She has two elves with her, capabilities unknown. Robert Friar is with the other group, led by Benessarai. He has Adam King. Location unknown. Capabilities unknown. I am at 1132—
Another voice sliced into her monologue, quick and cutting and as cold as the fire was hot: Not now! Send the ghost.
A door slammed shut.
Lily jolted. Blinked in disbelief.
“What?’ Drummond said urgently. “Did you connect? Did he hear you?”
Drummond had fully materialized again. When had he done that? She’d stopped seeing anything but the candle flame some time ago…how long? The chamber music was long since over. She heard Debussy now, the prelude to his Afternoon of a Faun, and she ached all over. She was exhausted. Limp and drained and exhausted. “I reached him. He shut me out.”
Drummond’s scowl came quickly. “He wouldn’t do that. Maybe I don’t like him, but he’d do anything to get to you. There’s no way he’d shut you out.”
“He…oh.” She realized she was speaking out loud and switched. I wasn’t trying to reach Rule. I did manage that once, but it was so short and I couldn’t tell if anything I sent got through. She wouldn’t let me have the toltoi. I needed the toltoi to contact Rule, so I was trying to reach Sam, the black dragon. And I did. And he shut me out. Lily blinked back tears of exhaustion. Not despair, no. It was just that she was so tired. But she wouldn’t cry because the dragon had been her last hope and he wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t even listen to her.
Drummond came and crouched in front of her. “You can’t give up.”
“I’m not.” She heard how flat her voice sounded, though, and realized she’d forgotten again and spoken out loud.
“Turns out all those assholes who said ‘where there’s life, there’s hope’ were right. Because on this side of the line, you can’t do anything. Not one damn thing. You’re still on the other side of that line. You can do something. Even if it doesn’t work, you can do something. You just have to keep doing something.”
Keep doing something. Yeah, sure, that sounded fine—but what?
She straightened, wincing at how sore her back was. He told me to send the ghost. That would be you. I guess he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. You can’t go to Rule. You can’t get more than a couple hundred feet from me.
Drummond didn’t answer.
I can try to reach Rule again. But even “talking” to Drummond felt draining. She’d about used up whatever resource she drew on for mindspeech.
“You said Turner could see me.”
Yeah, some. But you can’t get to him, so how does that—
The walls quit playing Debussy. Alycithin’s lilting voice replaced the music. “Lily, I regret that I must interrupt your mediation. I have heard from Robert Friar. It is time to make the exchange.”
THEY came for Lily with a gun, the SIG Sauer Al had seen earlier. The elf in jeans carried it. Al wanted to punch him so bad his clenched fists were shaking.
“I wish we had had longer to talk,” the halfling said in her beautiful voice. She held an object very familiar to Al—a set of police-issue restraints. “I enjoyed your company. Please put your hands behind your back so I may secure them.”
“What have you done to Sean?”
The other elf—who looked barely strong enough to carry a large sack of dog food—was toting Sean Friar back into the bedroom they’d just left.
“Only a sleep spell. He will be fine.”
She didn’t deserve this. Lily Yu was bright and brave and resourceful. She was a good cop. One of the best, and he had the years on the job to know what the best looked like. She was what he had been…once.
“Put your hands behind your back, please, Lily.”
“Are you out of drugged darts?”
“Robert Friar does not want you drugged.”
“I guess it would take all the fun out of it for him if I weren’t conscious and shaking with fear. Where are we going?”
The halfling was getting impatient. “To Robert Friar.”
Even before Al killed the bitch who’d killed his Sarah, he’d lost some of that shine. The job took it out of you, and he’d gotten hard, cynical, willing to cut corners. Then he lost Sarah, and he went crazy. Maybe he was still crazy, because he couldn’t regret killing Martha Billings. Not exactly. But he hadn’t given the law a chance. He’d decided his need to kill was bigger and more important than anything else. The law hadn’t failed him. He’d failed it. After that, he’d made one bad decision after another.
Lily shook her head. “I mean where in the city. If he is in the city. Will this be a long ride or a short one? How much time do I have left?”
She was still trying to get information. He couldn’t see what good that information would do her, but she was doing something. She hadn’t given up.
“It should take twenty minutes or less to get there. He is in an old warehouse not far from where I captured you. If you do not put your hands behind you back now, I will force you. It would be more dignified to comply.”
“I guess I’m not in a dignified mood.”
Sarah hadn’t deserved to die. Neither did Lily Yu, but Al was even more helpless this time. Condemned to watch it happen. Unable to do anything to stop it. He wanted to bang his head against the wall, but his head would go through the goddamn wall.
Alycithin nodded and said something in her language to the jeans-wearing elf. She handed him the restraints.
Yu tried. She had some moves, too, but the halfling—Al had never seen anything like her. She moved as fast as those damn lupi, and she had the whole package—speed, training, strength. It was over pretty quick, ending with Yu on her stomach on the floor, the halfling straddling her, and the other elf fastening the restraints.
He circled the pair of them, useless and furious and willing to do anything. Anything at all, if only there was something he could do.
The black dragon thought there was.
Send the ghost, he’d told her. Well, Al was the only ghost she had. The dragon had to mean him. He circled the two living people as Alycithin pulled Lily to her feet, unable to stop moving. Maybe the dragon was right. Dragons mostly were, when it came to the woo-woo stuff. Maybe there was something Al could do and he was too stupid to see it. Maybe he was as big a failure as a ghost as he had been as a cop and as a husband. If he—
His ankle brushed against something.
He jumped back. Astonished was way too small a word for what he felt. He hadn’t touched anything since he died. He could sort of feel walls and floors and people, but it wasn’t like touching them. It wasn’t the same at all.
Thin and taut, a glowing cord stretched away from Yu, angling slightly down.
That? That’s what he’d felt, the damn cord that ran between her and Turner? It was thinner than ever, as if it had been stretched way out. Tentatively he approached.
Lily’s gaze darted to him. The halfling was behind her, marching her forward. “You will not be noticed,” Alycithin said. “Do not tire yourself calling out or attempting to draw attention in other ways. Dinalaran, the door, please.”
Al reached out and touched the cord—or tried to. His hand went right through it. Disappointment crashed down so hard he could only stand there, staring. But he’d felt it. It had brushed his ankle. Why couldn’t he feel the damn thing now? He reached out with both hands—and his left hand touched it. Felt it. His left hand, where his wedding ring glowed.