Page 17 of Beyond the Veil (Endangered Fae #4)

Zack stared into the garden fountain, trying desperately to get his brain to work.

He’d put in a call to his friends at the Heersford Institute, but he hadn’t heard back yet.

If the Silver Adepts couldn’t find the prison, he didn’t know what to do next.

The assumption had been that the prison was in the capitol somewhere, but he’d had word from his staff in Shera’alej that anyone arrested for breaking magic control laws was transported by helicopter.

Lugh was still on the phone getting support lined up from certain key international players, but so far no one was willing to commit or so much as issue an official statement.

The buzzing in his pocket interrupted his moment of quiet. Carol’s number. What now?

“Zack? You might want to get over here.” Carol had to raise her voice over the babble in the administrative office.

He was moving even as he asked, “What is it? What in hells is all that noise?”

“Our little selkie stowaway’s parents have come looking for him and they brought the family.”

“Wonderful. Sorry about all this, Carol.”

“Don’t apologize. I took this job because I was tired of boring office work, remember?”

Zack managed a strangled laugh and tried to control the tic in his jaw when he walked into the verbal chaos.

Quite a mob had crowded into the office, which was roomy for the three or four humans usually working there, but cramped for twelve angry, arm-waving fae.

They wore robes from the receiving room at the top of the fae cavern stairs, so selkies apparently lived au natural normally.

Except for the small ears and the black on black eyes, they appeared human…

if maybe they had been a rock band with an odd taste in hair dye.

Long hair in various shades of white, blue, gray and green tumbled down their backs, all the colors of the world’s ocean waves.

“Hello? Excuse me.” He tried to speak politely above the tumult. When that got him nowhere, he bellowed, “Hey! Quiet down in here!”

The selkies turned to him, those big, black eyes conveying surprise. They were beautiful and just a little bit creepy as they all stared at him like they had one brain.

He decided to address the biggest male, since he seemed to have been making the most noise. “Good morning, I’m Zack Morrison, the Fae Collective Consul. I’m going to take a wild guess here and say you’re Limpet’s family.”

“We are his pod.” The big guy’s voice shook as he held out a hand to one of the female selkies. “I am his father, Cerith, and this is his mother, Lyonsia. He’s our pod’s youngest child. We’ve come to take him home.”

“Folks, I’d love to let you do that, but he’s not here.”

The mom, Lyonsia, wailed and threw herself sobbing into Cerith’s arms. “I told you! The Devourer has eaten him!”

“What? No!”

Just like that, Zack lost control of the situation again, and everyone reverted to trying to yell over each other. Flummoxed, Zack leaned against the doorway, rubbing at his forehead. I really don’t need this right now.

A sharp blare shredded through the yelling and Zack jerked his head up to find Carol standing on her desk in her sensible, proper dress shoes, with an air horn in hand and a scowl on her face.

“That’s quite enough! Inside voices! If you can’t behave like civilized selkies, you’ll have to go back down to the caverns.

Now, then. Consul Morrison is a Were. We don’t like the D-word here and he’s a lovely man who would never eat your son.

Limpet isn’t here because of choices Limpet made.

I suggest you go out to the garden with the Consul and he’ll explain all he can. ”

“Thanks, Carol. The icing on my day,” Zack said, but he waved the selkies after him. “Come on, folks. We’ll go have a seat in the garden and hopefully talk instead of yell.”

The selkies followed, subdued and unhappy, and managed to settle quietly in the grass by the fountain.

Cerith held his sobbing mate, trying to soothe her, so another one of the big ones spoke up.

“Simply tell us where Limpet has gone. We won’t trouble you any further. One ocean or another, we’ll find him.”

Zack heard the unspoken since you managed to lose him , and ignored it. “Well, that’s part of the problem. You can’t reach him by ocean and I really don’t recommend you going where he is.”

He explained, as briefly as he could, about magical laws, Shera’alej, the Canadian college students, Diego’s hopes to retrieve them and Limpet’s stowaway stunt. The selkies listened attentively, though they seemed to droop more and more through the telling.

“We should have taken him.” Lyonsia sniffed miserably. “He was so curious, so angry that we kept him by the home shore. We should have come through the door, all of us, so he could have seen for himself and been safe.”

There was a babble of voices then and Zack wondered how any of them ever made themselves understood. The phone buzzed against his thigh again and he excused himself to walk away a few steps and take the call.

“Hey, Sarge!”

“Nate! How’s it hanging, bud? Oh, sorry—guess I need to say Dr. Cooper now, huh?”

Nathan laughed, that same low, happy one he’d always had. “Yeah, well, Dr. Cooper’s for students, not for our Sergeant Morrison. Jazz says hi and he’s sorry we haven’t been able to visit. But you know, busy with our first grad students coming in and new research patients.”

“Hey, it’s okay. I get that. Maybe over the holidays or something. But I’m thinking you didn’t call just to catch up.”

“Right.” All the laughter drained from Nathan’s voice. “So we got your message about Mr. S. and Finn. Damn, I’m so sorry.”

“Just spit it out. You haven’t been able to look?”

“Oh, we tried. Kara’s here this week, so we had the full coven. We did the map dowsing, which should have worked, but we could only get so far. All we can tell you is that prison is somewhere in the desert of Shera’alej.”

“What’s that mean? Only so far?”

“Something was blocking us, Sarge. Either they’re using magic to hide the place, and wouldn’t that just be the most hypocritical thing ever, or they’re using one of the metals that act as a magic insulator for humans.

Lead, tin to some extent, something like that.

Whatever they’re using, we can’t get through. ”

“Damn it. Damn, damn, damn,” Zack muttered, kicking at a stone wall on one of the raised flowerbeds. “Sorry. Thanks for trying, Nate. It’s just so damn frustrating, sitting here wondering what’s happening to them.”

“I know. We feel it here, too. You just got them back and now this.”

Nate promised they would keep trying and as soon as Zack disconnected, the phone buzzed again.

“Morrison,” he snapped without looking at the number.

“Sir, it’s Kurt.”

“Tell me you have good news.” But Zack already knew from the defeated tone that he didn’t.

“Wish it was. Theo’s run off, sir, and took the selkie kid with him. They knocked out three guards, stole a truck from the embassy motor pool and took off.”

Theo? Zack stood frozen for a moment, trying to get his brain to reboot. “Fuck me running.”

“Sir?”

But Theo didn’t just do things without reason. He was one of the most reasonable people Zack knew. “Wait. When Mr. S. was arrested, did Theo say anything? Suggest anything?”

“I…I think he was saying something about being able to track Mr. Sandoval. But the kid was just out of bed after a sunstroke incident. He wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

Oh, Kurt, you idiot. “So you told him he was crazy and to shut up.”

“Something like that, I guess. You think he… Oh, crap.”

“Yeah, crap. They have a connection, those two, and I don’t know what the hell a vampire can and can’t track, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Next time Theo tells you something like that, you listen. Hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Zack pinched the bridge of his nose. “Meantime, you see if you can’t get a fix on what direction they went. Quietly, damn it. The last thing we need is for the anti-magic police to be looking for a vamp and a selkie. God, they’d probably shoot Theo on the spot if they knew what he is.”

He accepted Kurt’s chagrined apologies and sat down on the little retaining wall. The whole mess had just gotten a fuck ton messier.

At the next feeding, Diego found he had allies. The gray-haired gentleman, who communicated through Ethan that he had been his village’s healer before his arrest, brought another man with him. Suddenly, they were a force of six and Diego instructed them to snatch up as many packets as they could.

When the frenzy quieted, they had four extra, which they gave to some of the prisoners who had been knocked to the floor and hadn’t grabbed any.

The women’s rearguard paused to watch them, making the whole phalanx of women halt with her.

She pointed and there was arguing, but after much gesticulation and angry whispering, the woman who had stopped took a packet and brought it to another older man crouched by the wall.

She nodded to Diego, rejoined the women, and they hurried off into the shadows.

“That was wild,” Josh breathed. “You campaigning for mayor or something?”

“Just trying to get everyone to see that we’re all in this together,” Diego said between hurried bites of his own food. “Everyone gets fed, no one’s scared. No one’s scared, people start thinking again.”

“What are we supposed to be thinking of?” Ethan asked.

“I’m not sure yet. But I can’t help believing there’s some way out of this.”

“Been in some tight spots before, Mr. Diplomat?” Gavin’s question was more teasing than caustic.

“You wouldn’t believe the half of it.”

The boys stayed at the turn in the corridor as they always did when Diego made his second visit of the day to Finn. He began to dread each visit more and more, but he couldn’t bear to stay away. Abandoning Finn in his increasing deterioration was out of the question.