My mouth was dry and the copper taste of blood caught in my throat. But I didn’t feel too bad, actually. For a vision, this one was mild.
I pulled on my glove and sagged against the metal file cabinet at my back. Jinx handed me a paper cup of water and I gulped it down. It was holy water from our water cooler, not that it tasted any different than regular water, but at that moment it seemed to come straight from Heaven. I let out a satisfied breath and Jinx held up her notepad and pen.
“Any leads?” she asked.
Mab’s bones. A dancing, glowing orb had rousted the child from his bed and led him away from his home. Kaye’s books were filled with stories of wisps leading men to their doom. Could wisps, my own brethren, be responsible for the missing faerie children?
“Something woke the kid, some kind of dancing light,” I said. “Kid left of his own volition, but whatever that glowing orb was, it seemed to be leading him out of the house.”
“Did you see where the child went to?” Ceff asked, leaning forward.
“No, sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “He dropped the toy while fumbling with the latch on his front door. I just know that he followed the light outside.”
I remembered wrinkled pajamas disappearing into the darkness. I squeezed the paper cup, crushing it into a tiny ball, and tossed it across the room. It dropped short of the wastebasket, another thing to worry about later.
“At least he wasn’t hurt or anything, right?” Jinx asked.
“Yeah, the kid was fine last night,” I said. It had been dark outside during the vision, but now daylight was streaming in through our office windows. “But that was hours ago.”
Ceff rubbed the back of his neck and looked down at the floor. This had to be hard on him after losing his sons.
“What do you think the lights were?” she asked. “Some kind of spell?”
I hoped it was a spell, because if my suspicions were correct, then wisps were involved. If my own people were behind this, where did that leave me?
I’d been flinching away from the prospect of coming out as a faerie princess. But if wisps committed this crime, then I was partly responsible. My father, king of the wisps, had left our people leaderless. I had known this for months and done nothing.
I stared at the table covered in plastic bags—so many missing children. Had the same lights lured the other children from their beds? There was only one way to find out.
“I’ll know more when we’re done,” I said. I pointed to the table. “Keep ‘em coming.”
Jinx gave me an understanding nod and handed me a plastic bag. Ceff’s brow wrinkled and he cleared his throat.
“Are you certain?” he asked. “Couldn’t we search the homes for clues? The families may have missed something.”
The chances of that many families all missing something was a long shot. In the case of the winged child, he had walked out the front door himself. There had been no forced entry and the only physical intruders were the lights which floated in the air, never touching any surfaces. No, my gut told me that the answers were here in these objects, not back in the victims’ homes.
“I have to do this, now,” I said. “I can’t put this part of the job off until later. The first few hours are the most important in any missing person case. If I don’t learn anything new, then we’ll try other methods, but this is our best chance of finding out what happened last night.”
“She’s right,” Jinx said. She placed a hand on Ceff’s shoulder. “This is the best way to save these kids.”
“If you are both in agreement, then I acquiesce,” he said. Jinx put her hand on a curvy hip and raised an eyebrow. Ceff raised his hands, palm out, and smiled. “You are the professionals. I surrender.”
Professionals? I didn’t feel like a professional in my wrinkled, sweat stained clothes, but we had worked missing person cases before. I focused on the few facts we knew so far and what information we were missing.
“We need to know if the cases are connected,” I said. “Maybe, just maybe, one of the kids saw something that will lead us to where they’re being kept. And if we find the children, we’ll need backup to get them out.”
I was assuming that the children were still alive. We all were. To think that these children may already be dead was too horrible to imagine.
“I’ll call Jenna,” Jinx said.
The Hunters Guild wouldn’t sanction a raid to extract faerie children—they only fought to protect humans—but Jenna didn’t mind working a side-job, even if it was to save non-humans. For a Hunter, she was remarkably open-minded.
“I will send word to the leaders of the local water fae,” Ceff said. “For now, we should all remain vigilant.”
Ceff was right, fae families should be warned, but how was he going to contact the water fae? Ceff’s people, kelpies, could be reached through his sentinels at the harbor and the merrows could be called through a magic shell located along the beach, but I had hoped he’d stay here with me while I endured my visions. It was selfish, but true.
Ceff rose from his crouch and looked out the picture window. He waved a hand and began flicking his fingers in an intricate series of motions. Kelpie sign language? I guess hand signals would come in handy for a species that spent most of its time under water—though I had no idea how they communicated while in horse form.
I lifted my head to look outside and saw a kelpie bodyguard standing across the street. The man stood in the shadows, his face partially hidden behind a magazine and a baseball cap pulled down low on his head. The undercover guard was pretending to read, but he was holding the magazine upside down. The guy must be wet behind the ears (water fae humor), it was a newbie mistake.
Ceff and the kelpie guard exchanged hand signals, which the guard then relayed to someone further down the street. I suppose after Ceff’s abduction last summer, his guards weren’t straying far from his side. When he was done signing, Ceff returned to kneel on the floor beside me.
“I have done what I can to warn my people and our allies,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Let’s get this show on the road. Jinx?”
My friend stepped forward, plastic bag in hand.
“Ready?” she asked.
I lifted my chin and gave her a quick nod.
“I was born ready,” I said. Which, of course, wasn’t true, but the white lie eased the tension in the room.
I pulled off my glove and reached inside the bag. The second my fingers touched the small blanket, the room went dark. I sank into the vision, drowning in the memory of a child with too many limbs and too many teeth following a cloud of dancing lights.
Chapter 10
The kidnapped fae children had been as different from one another as night and day, but every one of them had left their homes while chasing balls of light. In every vision the glowing orbs danced and twinkled enticingly, just out of reach.
I rubbed my face and stretched cramped muscles. After subjecting myself to over two-dozen visions, I’d agreed to a shower and a nap. The visions the children left behind may have been mild compared to some I’ve experienced, but the vast number of them left me exhausted. The sleepless night hadn’t helped matters either.
I wasn’t sure if the hour of sleep had done me any good, but the shower had felt divine. Wrinkled, sweat stained clothes had been replaced with a clean pair of jeans, black tee, my spare pair of leather gloves, and black Doc Martens. My knives were already strapped into forearm sheaths, and my leather jacket, which would keep the weapons concealed in public, was tossed over the chair to my right.