“Where are we?”
“We aren’t sure,” Damien said. “We were out when they brought us here. Farther from the carnival—I can’t smell it.”
He was right. The air smelled woody, smoky. “In the forest,” I guessed. But there was a lot of forest near Loring Park, so that didn’t narrow it down much.
“They got you at the restaurant?”
Damien nodded. “Outside it. We were looking for you. When you didn’t come back, we got worried. Where’d they get you?”
“Walking back to the restaurant.” I considered Lakshmi’s visit to be RG business, which made it none of the Pack’s. “They were following me. And when I confronted them, they pounced. How long was I unconscious?”
“It’s one in the morning,” Damien said.
We’d been gone for a few hours. Ethan would be in a panic. I called his name, tried to activate the link between us, but couldn’t reach him. He was too far away.
“What the hell are they?”
“Elves,” Jeff said. “At least, that’s what they looked like. They’re relatives of the fairies—mutated relatives. They look even less human, so they had an even harder time assimilating. They call themselves the People. Believe they are the highest order of sentient beings. Everyone else is Other.”
“Early Europeans found them, hunted them down,” Damien continued, looking around, wincing when the move strained his shoulder. “They were believed extinct. Looks like that’s fundamentally wrong.”
“They must have migrated,” Damien said. “But how did we not know they were here?”
I glanced at the carefully constructed room, the gaps between the saplings neatly filled with mud or daub. This place hadn’t been built yesterday; the elves had been here for some time. Which made me also wonder how the shifters had missed them.
“Magic?” I suggested, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Damien, who shook his head.
“Do you know what they want?” Jeff asked me.
“They said they were attacked.”
“By the harpies?”
I shook my head. “The ones that jumped me said harpies were imaginary. They thought I was lying.”
Sounds rose outside—shrieks and pounding feet. Instinctively, I pulled at my chains, seeking freedom.
Sentinel?
My head darted up, searching for the sound of his voice in my head. Ethan? Are you here? We’re chained.
Working on it, he told me. I’ve brought your army.
“Something’s up,” Damien said, glancing at the noise that was beginning to shake the walls of our prison.
“Ethan’s here. He said he’s brought an army.”
Before I could answer, a door on the other side of the room was shoved open. Three elves, the man from before and two new men, walked in. Without speaking or acknowledging our existence, they unlinked the chains that bound us to the floor. But they didn’t unchain our bound hands and feet.
They yanked us to our feet and pushed us outside.
It was dark, the bits of sky visible through the canopy of limbs still indigo. But that was the only thing that made sense. We were in a wood, the trees stripped bare by winter.
We were also in a village.
Structures, cylindrical like the one we’d just stepped out of, filled every clearing in the woods around us, white smoke puffing from the openings in the conical roofs. Footholds had been cut into the tree trunks, and smaller structures hung from the trees. The structures looked old. Comfortable and lived in, with rough-hewn tools hanging along the exteriors and green linens strung across lines that extended between the trees. This wasn’t a camp; it was a neighborhood.
The elves were everywhere. Hundreds of men and women, all approximately middle-aged, trim and fit in the same tunics, either running toward the sounds of battle with slicked bows in hand, or battening down their simple homesteads. Untying lines of laundry, carrying steaming cooking pots into their homes.
There was an entire city of elves tucked into the woods outside Chicago and no one had seen it? No one had discovered them? How was that possible?
“And I didn’t even have time to welcome them to the neighborhood with muffins,” Jeff murmured beside me.
“I didn’t get muffins, either,” I pointed out, trying to keep some levity.
“I didn’t know you then. We get out of this, I’ll get you a muffin.” He tried for a smile, so I tried back.
“Deal,” I said.
“This way,” said the man from the shopping center, pulling my katana from the scabbard he’d belted around his waist.
I generally preferred not to be poked with my own sword, and certainly not by the very person who’d taken it from me. He yanked my arm, pulling me forward. Since we were moving toward the sounds, I didn’t fight back. They were taking me precisely where I wanted to go.
With Damien and Jeff stumbling behind us, we walked the narrow path through the trees and up a low rise, which gave way to a snowy field, still dotted with the remains of last year’s cornstalks . . . and marked by the columns of the invading army.
They’d found us.
Chapter Nine
THE SPOILS OF WAR
There were hundreds of shifters, some in NAC jackets, some in animal form. All behind the front line—which consisted of the Keenes, Nick, Ethan, Catcher, and Mallory—and waiting for orders.
Ethan searched the marching bulk, body stilling when he finally saw me, as he took in the chains on my ankles and whatever concoction of blood and dirt had stiffened on my face. His body went rigid, his eyes hot with fury, and I feared he’d begin the charge himself, ripping through elves in order to punish them for my injuries.
I’m fine, I assured him, hoping to delay First Blood, and glad he couldn’t hear the hoarseness in my voice.
Sentinel, he crisply said. You’ve managed to get yourself into trouble again.
They nabbed me as I was walking down the sidewalk, I assured him. And I think the Canon needs updating.
Evidently, he responded, and there was a gravelly edge to his voice.
How did you find us?
Damien sent an alert before he was taken. The shifters scented out the rest of it.
The elf’s fingers still wrapped tightly around my arm, we marched forward, creating another line of troops. Behind us echoed the muted and rhythmic thud of boots on soil. The elves had their own army, and quarters had been called.
They stretched out beside us, shifting their short rows to form three long lines with Rockette-level precision. They raised their bows and tucked arrows into the strings, the silver arrowheads glinting in the moonlight, the air thick with tension and magic.
Our escort pushed us to our knees, where we knelt on hard, frozen ground in front of our colleagues and loved ones, enemies at our backs, weapons in their hands.
Ethan looked calmly at the elves, his body stiff and hiding the fear and anger that I knew ripped at him. But fear was a nasty motivator, and we didn’t need another supernatural war brewing outside Chicago. Not when events there were tense enough.
They were attacked, I told Ethan. And they think we—the Pack and vampires—were the culprits. They followed us, took us in. They must have been waiting for an opportunity to get us alone.
Ethan murmured to Gabriel beside him, probably offering the intel.
“You have breached our peace,” said the elf. “You shed First Blood.”