Karen Chance - Midnight's Daughter

A few minutes later she wound down enough that I managed to insert a sentence into the tirade. “I’ve been looking for you,” I offered mildly.

Claire’s forehead unknotted slightly. “I knew you would. I was only gone a couple of days, but the damned Fey timeline isn’t in sync with ours and… anyway, I hope you didn’t worry.”

I thought back over the last month, to the sleepless nights and the restless days, to the fights and the calls and the threats and the beatings, and I smiled. “A little.”

“I’m really sorry, Dory, but you won’t believe everything that’s—” She caught me peering at her face and grabbed her nose, looking mortified. “Oh, God! Am I morphing? Tell me I’m not morphing!”

“Uh. No. Are you supposed to be?”

“Only in Faerie, so far.” Claire looked relieved. “Don’t stare at me like that! It freaks me out.”

“Sorry. I just… aren’t you supposed to have pointy ears or something?”

“Vulcans! Vulcans have pointy ears. Do I look like an alien to you?”

“No, but you never looked much like a Fey, either.”

“I would like to apologize for my mistake, lady,” Heidar said, jumping in during the nanosecond pause in the conversation. He’d obviously been around Claire for a while. “I was under the impression that you were a vampire.”

“I get that a lot,” I said kindly. “I’m Dory.”

The Fey brightened. “Is this where I introduce myself?” he whispered in a loud aside to Claire, who looked horrified.

“Oh, God.”

“I have been practicing,” Heidar informed me proudly, then launched into a recital of what had to be fifty names, most with explanations.

“Never ask them their names,” Claire advised as Heidar rattled on. “Just. Don’t.”

“Okay. It seems you’ve been busy.” I poked her in the middle. “Anything in there I should know about?”

She blanched. It made her freckles stand out like spots on white paper. “How did you hear about that?”

“Are you kidding me? So far, I had that runt Kyle—”

“I hate him. I hate all vamps. That complete toad , Michael—”

“—tell me you were pregnant by a vamp—”

“—kidnapped me and—Kyle said what ?”

“—and then a member of the Domi shows up and informs me—”

“The Domi sent someone here ?”

“—that you’re actually pregnant by the late king of the Fey.”

“Late?!” Heidar squeaked.

I stopped and looked at him. His hair was miraculously still mostly dry, despite the downpour. Claire’s, on the other hand, was as wet as mine, frizzing and straggling around her face like a dead animal pelt. It was hard to believe they were both half-Fey.

“Let me guess, you’re Alarr?”

“It means Elven general,” Heidar enlightened me automatically. “But, please, lady, I beg of you, tell us what you know of my father.”

“I’m sorry, not a lot. Only that he’s missing and presumed dead.”

“That is impossible,” Heidar said with conviction.

I didn’t feel like arguing the point, especially when I suspected he might be right. “Okay.” I looked at Claire sternly. “You want to tell me what’s been going on?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Hit the highlights.”

“Well, Heidar and I met at work—he’d come to bid on something—only my boss—you remember Matt, the gorilla in a suit?” I nodded. Her former boss at Gerald’s did look frighteningly like a shaved ape. “He’d decided to sell me to Sebastian, who’d finally tracked me down, only it didn’t work out quite like they’d planned. Heidar and I escaped into Faerie, but the damned Svarestri attacked us. We got away—you don’t even want to know how—and made it back to New York, but when I stopped by the house, Michael grabbed me for the bounty—” She stopped suddenly, looking stricken.

“Which you failed to mention to me.”

Claire rallied quickly. “I knew how you’d react, Dory! And you don’t know what the family is like. They’re… they can be very bad news.”

“So can I.”

“See!” Claire screeched. “See, I knew that’s what you’d say! You’d have gone stomping off—”

“I don’t stomp.”

“—to see Sebastian, and my slimy excuse for a cousin would have had you killed! He was surrounded by body-guards all the time, the little shit, and most of them were mages. With some of their spells, well, they can take down vamps, you know?”

“And we’re talking about him in the past tense because?”

“Oh, Heidar killed him,” she said, as an afterthought. I decided not to ask or we’d be here all night.

“So Michael kidnapped you and took you where?” I prompted.

“To Sebastian, for the bounty. Only of course Seb was dead and the family was busy fighting over the inheritance and couldn’t be bothered. Michael was actually pissed at me, like I’d asked him to kidnap me or something. But I told him I was carrying a half-Fey child and that its father was the king, and he couldn’t kill me then because the Fey would—”

“Separate his worthless head from his spineless body,” Heidar managed to get in.

“So you aren’t pregnant?” I asked for clarification.

“Um,” Claire said. And stopped.

“Er,” Heidar added, blushing.

I looked between the two of them. Obviously, Caedmon’s story had been off by a generation. Then I recalled something. “A couple of days ?!”

“Um, yes, well, it was more like a week, actually—”

I held up a hand. I was soaking and cold and my shoulders hurt. The details I could do without. “Just tell me how you got away from Michael. I know you were at the caves.”

“That place,” Claire said, wrinkling her nose in Virgo disgust for such disorder. “Michael decided to sell me to some dark mages he knew for a null bomb. He figured he could at least get something for his trouble that way, only the mages said they wouldn’t touch me until they checked with the Fey. But Michael had been carting me around for over a day trying to get a paycheck and—”

“Where were you?” I asked Heidar.

He looked sheepish. “I opposed Claire’s wish to return to your home. The Svarestri do not know the human world well, but they have occasionally ventured here. I considered the risk to be—”

“I was only going to leave a quick note,” she said testily.

“So you ditched your only bodyguard with—let’s see—the mages, the vamps and Fey after you?”

“There’s no reason to take that tone, Dory. And anyway, this was before Michael. I didn’t know the vamps were after me, too.”

I let it drop. We were going to have a very long conversation at some point, but not now. “Okay. So you got away from Michael how?”

“I was trying to tell you.” Claire glared me into submission. “ So Michael got pissed at the mages, who wouldn’t pay him until they were sure they’d actually be able to harvest me, and he trashed their place. You’ve never seen anything like it. Bodies everywhere, and so much blood and—you know how I feel about blood. I may have passed out.”

I gave her a look. Claire gets nauseous from a paper cut. She sighed. “Okay, I did pass out. And when I woke up, I was being taken to the auction. Michael had found some guys who used to work for the mages who weren’t the kind to ask questions—”

“And Drac found you there.”

“Yes. He just took me; didn’t pay or anything. Then we went to this total rathole of a motel—I mean that literally; it had rats. You could hear them in the walls—” I nodded. Drac must not have wanted to risk my leaking his Bellagio room number to the Senate and moved to the other extreme of the spectrum. “—and one of his men kept eating them, and I said I was going to be sick and went outside and they’d left the keys in the car—”