“I have done magic!” Widget gave the evil laugh again. “It’s a little known fact that all cars sold in Pittsburgh—with the exception of antique vehicles like your Dodge—still have antitheft GPS systems. Little known because the city is stuck in the last century, technology-wise. Really—I cry at night for the Internet of Earth. I miss it so.”
“What is it? This antitheft whatever.”
“My point exactly.” Widget ducked, grinning. “Simply put, the United States managed to get into the treaty that they could have a handful of satellites up in Elfhome space. They’re all hush-hush about it. It’s all part of the ‘Pittsburgh is still an American city’ brouhaha that they’re still fighting over in the UN. Since they’re American, the satellites aren’t under EIA control. Nor can the local police access it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“No idea. Probably politics. The University of Pittsburgh, though, has access to them and their security is full of student-made backdoors. Voila!” She held up her tablet to show off a bunch of dots moving on a map.
“And that is…?”
“Our mystery SUV! It’s in…Fairywood. Where’s that?” She turned the tablet back and zoomed out. “Oh, downstream, our side of the river.”
“And those other dots?”
“Um.” She put down her tablet to tap on it again. “This one is BAS-0053.” She read off another one of the identifiers and crosschecked it. “It’s also an EIA UPU vehicle. It looks like they have a whole fleet out in Fairywood. Four at least. Acting weird. They’re like ants; crawling around aimlessly.”
“They’re grid searching,” Law said. “Can you pull up the viceroy’s cars?”
The elves had a small fleet of the big gray luxury cars for Windwolf and Sparrow’s exclusive use. Normally they were kept in coach houses of Poppymeadow’s when the viceroy wasn’t in town.
“Let’s see.” Widget closed the window and pulled up a database. She searched for information faster than Law could follow. “Yes, they do have antitheft systems. Oh. Oh. Blast it all!”
A lone Rolls Royce sat motionless in Fairywood, the EIA cars prowling around it like a pack of wargs. This wasn’t one lone nutcase elf posing as a human; this was some secret alliance of evil. The other Rolls Royces milled about in Oakland, obviously looking for their lost leader in the wrong place.
“They screwed up their hit on the viceroy.” Law watched the markers on the screen move. It was fairly easy to read the activity on the screen since she knew the design of the trap. “He’s on foot; running for his life. They probably have people chasing him.” She remembered the dogs barking in Fairywood. “Or dogs. Yeah, probably dogs. They’re forcing him toward the river.” There were only a handful of bridges across the Ohio River and the waters were full of man-eating fish. “The cars will close in from either side, like the jaws of trap.”
“Something has changed,” Bare Snow whispered.
“What do you mean?” Law asked.
“They have stayed hidden for thousands of years, carefully keeping to the shadows. This is too bold a move. Something has changed.”
“Well, someone has dropped a major human city onto the face of the planet.”
Bare Snow was shaking her head. For the first time since Law found her, the female looked frightened. “They think they have the upper hand. They would not act so brazenly if they did not know they could quickly take control of all of the Westernlands.”
Her history lesson suddenly made sense. She had laid out what it was that these hidden elves wanted: a world where the lives of others meant nothing when weighed against their comforts.
Law was getting that familiar angry feeling that she got from having her nose rubbed in injustice. It was a clenching of teeth until her jaw hurt, and the nails of her fingers digging into her clenched hands.
“We have to go,” Bare Snow said in English.
Law nodded in agreement.
Bare Snow threw her arms around Law and kissed her. It was so sudden that Law didn’t really get a chance to enjoy it.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Widget cried. “Really?”
“Um.” Law was still off-balanced by the kiss. “Yeah. I’m an expert at getting people out of shit-deep messes.”
Pittsburgh had been a city of bridges; nearly five hundred just in the city proper and another thousand scattered in the hills around it. It no longer had the means to keep them all maintained. It lacked the money and the manpower and simple necessity of linking one abandoned neighborhood to another. Main roads linked the city together, but not in a short and direct method. An hour before Shutdown and those main roads were bumper to bumper with several thousand vehicles trying to get into position at the checkpoints or back home before the floodgates of Earth opened up.
Luckily the traffic kept to the main roads, leaving the side streets, backyards, and occasionally shallow streams clear for Law. (Got to love six-wheel drive.) As the crow flies (which was close to the way Law drove) it was six miles to Windgap.
“We need to be careful,” Law said. “Just in case we run into the viceroy’s guard.”
“They were decoyed somehow from his side. They will not know where to even start looking for him.”
They reached Fairywood. The viceroy’s car sat on the last dead end street, its headlights still shining on the house where Law had found Bare Snow. The driver’s and the back passenger doors were open. One of the sekasha warriors lay sprawled on the ground beside the big gray luxury car. He’d been dragged from the car and mauled by a large animal.
“Oh no,” Law whispered. Was it the same “teenage” male that she’d met just hours ago? She crouched down beside the bloody body and shone her flashlight on the pale face. No. Stormhorse’s eyes had been dark brown and this male had eyes of Wind Clan blue. He still looked impossibly young and vulnerable. Pat Hershel had said that it was the “babies” of the bodyguards that knew how to drive.
“He sacrificed himself,” Bare Snow murmured sadly. “The metal within the car kept the viceroy from using his domana spells. The holy one drew the attackers to his side of the vehicle so the viceroy could escape out the other way and use his magic.”
“Why didn’t his shield spell protect him?” Law panned her flashlight over the ground. There were four pug dogs scattered around him. Judging by the massive burn marks on the dogs and crisscrossing the pavement, they’d been killed by lightning. It looked like a thunderstorm had opened up a can of whoop-ass on twenty square feet of Fairywood. The pugs had to be the little yap dogs she’d heard barking earlier. They were just tiny things; the heaviest might have been fifteen pounds. They couldn’t have been what mauled the warrior.
Dozens of large bloody paw prints mapped the sekasha’s death. They were larger than a warg’s, didn’t have the wolflike X-shape arrangements of toes and pad, nor were there marks left by the nonretracting claws. They looked like mountain lion tracks, but those were normally only four inches across. These were nearly eight inches, meaning that the beast was freaking huge.
“The shield draws power from the local ambient magic. It can only afford so much protection. Wyverns. Black willows. Saurus. Wargs. If the beast can pin the warrior, its only a matter of time before the spell fails.”
Beyond the abandoned car, the dead bodies, the bloody tracks, and the scorch marks, there was no sign of the viceroy. Distantly Law could hear a pack of animals howling. The cadence was wrong for a warg; it was much more the fast baying of excited, little dogs. The sound echoed loud and weirdly distorted. It nearly seemed like the dogs were at the bottom of a well, the steep sides echoing as well as amplifying the howls. It was coming from Chartiers Creek, a half-mile or so off. She kept losing the sound of it under the rumble of a nearby freight train that followed the creek bottom to the Ohio River.