Page 29

Leo needed him. If he didn’t do something, and soon, his love would be sealed away in one of the countless rooms at OotL—or might meet a worse fate—and Crispin would never find him.

“All right, take me to the Queen.”

“Take us too.” Minkis got up on his hind legs, his bushy tail waving back and forth in an agitated fashion.

“What?”

“Go with you, find Chaos Man.”

“It’s better if you stay here. I don’t want to see you get hurt.” Again.

“Know where he is. Little cloud talks to me.”

Crispin’s jaw dropped. “You… the cloud… what?”

“I believe Minkis has established a connection with Leo.” Thea’s voice this time.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any stranger. “Can you take us there?”

Thea’s screen flashed. “Not clear yet. But I can take you to your mother.”

Crispin sighed heavily, as one does when one’s shoulders are weighted down by all the cares of the world. “Yes, take me to Her High Holy Fairyness. But first, let me grab a few things.”

He threw some supplies into a carry sack, along with a few other items he thought might come in handy, and in a few moments was ready to go. “You coming, my little furry friend?”

Minkis dropped the acorn he’d been working on and scampered up Crispin’s sleeve to perch comfortably on his shoulder. “Minkis ready, Acorn Man.”

Crispin frowned, then decided he’d been called worse. He scooped Thea up and held her out before him. “Let’s go!”

Prickles—the hotel of the cactus dicks and the sometimes-home of The Estate—looked like something out of a war zone.

Minkis’s tail shot up. “Bad.”

Crispin’s eyes had gone wide. “Bad indeed, my friend.”

Fire engines lined the streets, red lights flashing, illuminating a building that was half missing, eaten away by the poison from the chalice and by the Chaos Leo had unleashed.

Some of the walls—those that were still standing—ended in a strange gray nothingness, and a crowd of people stared numbly at the remains.

Crispin sometimes forgot that the places where his mother’s Estate appeared were real, not just backdrops for her social games.

“We’re gonna need a new hotel.” Thea’s matter-of-fact voice brought him back down to… well, Varth, which was the home of Odds, the gambling metropolis where the Mother of Fae had most recently set up camp.

He cast around for signs of his mother and brother. As much as he’d never wanted to see them again after that last charming visit, neither did he want them to come to harm. They were family, after all.

“Forest is better.” Minkis sniffed the air, looking back and forth at the devastation. “No Leo here.”

From Crispin’s vest pocket, Thea chimed in. “Squirrel’s got you there.”

Crispin nodded. He’d have been very surprised if the quest had been that simple.

He started to walk around the disaster scene, gently pushing past the refugees and onlookers.

No one seemed to notice that he had a squirrel on his shoulder.

Of course, in the free-wheeling city of Odds, that was way down the list of strange things you were likely to see.

The world beyond the hotel seemed startlingly normal. Is the Chaos contained, then?

That’s when he found his mother standing in a side alley with his brother Aspin.

They were surrounded by a group of wizards in long flowing purple robes, whose hands were extended toward what used to be Prickles.

A lone police officer was speaking with her.

He was nearly human save for his forehead horn—which looked disturbingly like the cactus pricks at Prickles, and didn’t that explain a lot?

—and the fact that his legs ended in wide, black, cloven hooves.

The cop was gamely trying to take a statement from the Queen of the High Holy Fae.

“… a goblet of poison? Ma’am, have you been drinking?”

“Yes, but that’s not the point.” She sighed heavily, and Crispin realized with a start that she looked different.

While she remained beautiful, the small telltale signs of aging that he’d seen on his last visit had spread.

Wrinkles emphasized her features, and her hair was still the flat gray it had changed to during his last ill-fated visit.

Even her shoulders slumped in their finery, and the delicate beauty of her silver dress—where had she gotten that in the midst of all this literal chaos? —looked as if it had seen better days.

“Mother?”

“Crispin!” Her eyes met his, and some of the old sparkle returned. She touched the policeman’s cheek gently. “You will remember none of this. Now go.”

He blinked. “Ma’am, I’ll ask again. Are you drunk? Maybe we should have this conversation down at the station.”

She frowned and touched him again.

His eyes went blank, and when they refocused, he managed a dopey smile. “Of course, ma’am. Thank you for your time.” Then he turned and walked away.

“Losing your touch?” Crispin maneuvered around one of the concentrating wizards to come face-to-face with his mother and his arch-nemesis brother.

She made a cute little moue that would have been charming before she’d lost most of her magic. Aspin stepped forward, looming belligerently. “It’s your fault. You and that half-breed human you brought here?—”

A wave of their mother’s hand cut Aspin off as neatly as if she’d choked him.

Crispin expected a scathing remark from her, possibly accompanied by a threat that would sear the flesh off his bones. He braced himself and closed his eyes.

Instead he felt her arms around him, smelled her familiar perfume—one-third toadstool, one-third moonlight orchid, and one-third rainbow.

“I’m so glad you’re alive.” She hugged him tightly, and for the first time in years he found himself speechless in front of his own mother.

Minkis twittered. “She smells nice.”

“I... that is… you really shouldn’t….” He took a deep breath. This wasn’t the time for recriminations. He needed her help to find Leo, and it seemed as if she needed his too. “Thank you.”

She let him go, her eyes narrowing at the sight of the little squirrel, as if she’d just seen him. “We’ve created a frightful mess, you and I.” Her anxious gaze over his shoulder reminded him that the hotel was in ruins, just as another wall collapsed with a resounding crash.

He raised an eyebrow. “We?” He wasn’t used to seeing her like this. Vulnerable. Almost mortal.

She had the grace to blush. “Fair enough. You may have precipitated it with your arrival, but if I hadn’t listened to your supervisor?—”

“Bidulla put you up to it?” Crispin frowned. His mother was never manipulated by other people. She was the one who did the manipulating.

“Yes. Handsome woman, that one.” A little of the old Cerillia showed though with that taunt. “She was insistent that the Chaos fragment?—”

“Leo.”

“Right. That Leo be recaptured, before he could do more harm.”

“And the poison chalice?—”

“Was specially formulated for him. It would have knocked him out. Not killed him. I’m not a monster, whatever else you may think of me.”

Manipulator. Liar. Corrupted by your own power. But he said none of those things. “So how did it cause all of this?”

She sighed.

She’d just lost everything she’d ever owned. Have a little compassion, like Leo showed you. “Tell me what happened.”

“She’s hiding her acorns,” Minkis said.

Thea’s voice followed. “He’s not wrong. She’s hiding something.”

“Why is your pet rat talking about me?” She pulled back, staring at Minkis and then at Thea’s glow emanating from his vest pocket. “And how?”

“ Squirrel. And he swallowed a little bit of Leo. He might be able to lead me to him.” He frowned. “Enough evasion. Tell me everything. And then maybe I can help you fix this.”

Another crash, and something heavy hit the street behind him, making him jump.

A toilet bowl, being slowly dissolved by a random bit of Chaos.

One of the wizards stepped forward and thrust his hands toward it, and the creeping, sizzling nothingness stopped in its tracks.

Aspin frowned. “They’re not making any progress. It’s getting worse.”

“I know.” His mother seemed to make up her mind. “They can hold it off for a while yet, though.” Her voice cracked, just a little.

This was not the strong woman, self-assured to the point of absurdity, that he had grown up with. He felt pity for her. Which in turn made him feel very strange indeed—as if all that he had always assumed was up was now actually down .

“Come with me, both of you. It’s time I let you in on all of my secrets.”