Page 34 of The Bloody Ruin Asylum & Taproom (Sam Quinn #7)

Twenty-Eight

Bracken: the Supernatural Search Engine

I heard knocking and eventually a clicking sound.

“What a nice surprise,” a man said. “Oh, you know how I love your oatmeal cookies. Thank you. Come in, come in.”

“Sam, I’m putting you on speakerphone. Uncle Bracken, do you remember me telling you about Bridget’s daughter Sam?”

“Of course,” the man said. “Quinn wolf on her father’s side and wicche on ours. A necromancer, you told me.”

“Exactly,” Arwyn said. “She’s in Hungary with her husband on hush-hush vampire business and she’s dealing with a fae guy known as the prince who possessed a vampire, trying to use him to kill her.”

“Fascinating,” he said on a sigh. “I’ve never heard of a vampire being possessed before.” He paused. “Are we sure she’s not dealing with a demon?”

“Sam?” Arwyn said, basically asking me to take over.

“Hello, Bracken. Thank you very much for helping us,” I said.

“Oh, my dear, you’ve given me a treat. Now, what can you tell me about him?”

“I’ve met demons before. He doesn’t feel like one to me. He feels fae and he has the golden skin some fae have.”

“Mm-hm.” It sounded like he was scratching a pen or pencil across paper. “What did he say and do?”

“He talked about his disloyal daughters—no, girls. I don’t think he ever called them his daughters.

The folktale I heard about said daughter, but he said girls.

Anyway, the story was that he was a cruel prince with many daughters.

It said he had a grand palace at the bottom of a huge river and that the water turned blood red from him beating them. ”

“The Danube Prince,” Bracken said. “Yes, I’m familiar with that tale. That story took place in Vienna, I believe.”

“We’re in Budapest but the Danube is quite close to us,” I told him.

“Just a minute,” he said.

There was movement in the background.

“He went to retrieve one of his journals,” Arwyn told us.

After a few minutes of a man making hmm-ing sounds and turning pages, he said, “Ah, here it is! Researching folktales is a hobby of mine. This journal is from thirty-one years ago. I was just skimming over my notes to refamiliarize myself.”

There was a pause. “Sit. Sit. All right. So you understand, when I research a subject, I read through everything I can find, those texts written by humans as well as supernaturals. I also interview anyone who might have pertinent information. For this tale, I read four texts and spoke with a water sprite, a wood nymph, and a dwarf. What I’m going to tell you is a synthesis of all the stories into what I believe is as close to the truth as I could get. All right?”

“Yes, thank you,” I replied.

“He sounds like one of our historians,” Clive murmured.

“Do vampires have historians too?” Bracken asked. Clive blinked, seemingly surprised that Bracken had heard him through the line. Wicches, in general, don’t have the super-hearing wolves and vampires do.

“Of course you do,” Bracken continued. “That only makes sense. Might I ask if I could interview you when you have a few moments? I’d be more than happy to drive to San Francisco when you return home.”

Eyebrows raised, I wait to see what Clive would say. He gave me a good long look, rolled his eyes on a smile, and finally said, “I’m sure I could find some time to speak with you.”

“Splendid! Now let’s get back to the prince.

” He let out a long breath and started again.

“I’m not sure if you know, but reproduction is very difficult for the fae.

The part of the story that initially caught my interest was this idea of him having many daughters whom he abused horribly.

It made no sense. The fae cherish their young.

“The translation in one of the texts seemed suspect to me. The word was daughter, but it struck me that in a Germanic dialect of Middle English—one I’ve only heard spoken by the fae—the word daughter and the word that essentially meant chattel or possession sounded very similar.

“I could have been wrong, so I interviewed a few members of the fae. I found a water sprite who knew the dialect I’d been looking for and when I asked her about the Danube Prince, she became enraged, the water around her turning turbulent.

She told me he was an evil bastard who had abducted other water fae—female only—and kept them imprisoned away from the river.

When they tried to escape, to return to the Danube, he’d caught them and beat them bloody to keep them from leaving him. ”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If they knew what he was doing, why didn’t Algar or the queen step in to do anything about it?”

“Ah,” Bracken said, a smile in his voice, “you know the players. Excellent. The one who calls himself the prince is the younger brother—or relative of some kind—of the fae king—names have power, and we don’t want to attract their attention, so I won’t use it,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Especially his, as he’s regularly sending his assassins after me.”

“My dear, I’m so sorry,” Bracken said. “He is a horribly petty man who clutches grudges as though they were precious gems. Anyway, the king protected the prince by exiling him to the human realm. With his captives. The ones the stories refer to as his daughters.”

He sighed and then continued. “Some of these poor women had never been in the human realm, had no idea their magic would work differently here. Others were stolen here, water fae from the Danube. One of his prisoners was a mermaid who had been one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting.

They were quite close, and though she was water fae, the queen gifted her with flower magic because the young woman so loved the flowers that grew along the banks of the rivers in Faerie. ”

“I remember,” I murmured. “They’re gorgeous. We don’t have anything like them in this realm. Big blowsy blossoms drooping toward the water, their heads bobbing in the wind.”

There was silence for a moment and then Bracken said, “You’ve been to Faerie? Oh, my dear, I’d love to interview you as well as your husband. My goodness, what a turn this day has taken.”

The queen hadn’t sworn me to secrecy about Faerie, so I figured it would be okay. I mean, look at this right now. If people hadn’t spoken to Bracken thirty-something years ago, we still wouldn’t know who we were dealing with. “Sure,” I said. “I can tell you some stuff.”

“Excellent. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, the queen’s beloved friend had been stolen.

What I’d been told was that this friend observed the king in yet another of his trysts and had informed the queen.

In his rage, he abducted the queen’s friend, took her to the human realm, and handed her over to his brother, relative, ally—whoever the prince actually is.

“The queen searched far and wide throughout Faerie. Her guards left no corner of her realm forgotten. The young woman was simply gone. The queen never stopped looking, though, sending her people into other realms to search. She’s been mourning the loss of her beloved for a very long time now.”

“So, this building we’re in right now,” I said, “has been a number of things over the centuries, but he referred to it as the prince’s palace.” A thought occurred to me. “Wait. He’s fae. Is it possible he’s still alive in here? I’d thought he was a ghost, but do the fae leave ghosts?”

“My dear, if he still there, you must leave immediately. You’re dealing with an exiled fae possessing a vampire—something I hadn’t considered possible. Their magics are antithetical to one another. If he can do that, who knows what else he can do?”

“Yes,” Clive said. “I hadn’t thought it possible either. They abhor us. We’re death. They’re life.”

“Perhaps,” Bracken said, “that’s an indication of how twisted he’s become, how removed from the light and power of Faerie. I wish I could be more help. I have no idea how to break a bond that shouldn’t exist. I fear only the queen herself could do it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you so much. We’d never have known any of this without you. When we get home, Clive and I will drive down to Monterey to visit and talk with you.”

“Marvelous!” Bracken said. “Did you hear that, Arwyn? We’ll have visitors soon.”

“Hopefully,” Arwyn said. “Unfortunately, right now, Sam’s in trouble. In what I saw, he called you a fisherman, but he knows who you are. Or, maybe not who you are, but he senses power and sees a woman and it’s pissing him off. Does the vampire have issues with women too?”

I looked at Clive.

“No,” Clive said. “I’ve never witnessed that. He does have an issue with Sam because of her werewolf blood. For whatever reason, he doesn’t trust them and therefore doesn’t trust her. I thought he’d made his peace with our relationship when we married, but I see now I was wrong.”

“Do me a favor,” Arwyn said. “Don’t be alone with that vampire guy. It feels deeper than just I don’t like werewolves.”

A chill ran down my spine. “I will.”

“And remember,” Bracken said, “if the prince knows who you are, then the king will soon know where you are.”

“I hate that guy,” Arwyn said. “Call me if you need anything. Oh, and that one girl, the teenager. You need to see if you can help her.”

“I’m working on it,” I replied. I just needed to figure out what Léna wanted.

We said our goodbyes. It was almost daybreak before we finally settled in to sleep.

I woke late in the afternoon. My head still hurt, but it was nothing like the night before. The healer seemed to have done a good job, for which I was grateful. Clive was sleeping beside me, his arm still wrapped around my waist.

Dropping a kiss on his nose, I said, “I have to get up now.”

He pulled me in tighter and mumbled, “No.”

“Unless you want me to wet the bed, you really need to let me move.” I pushed his arm and he relented.

I took a long moment to process my face, the huge black bruising over half of it, my left eye swollen shut. When Cadmael spiked my head into the tile floor, it must have been tilted so I went left-side down. That probably saved me from a broken nose to go with my cracked skull.

I’d trained myself not to look in mirrors for years. I could do it again. Finishing getting ready, I tied my hair up in a braid and considered what I could do before sunset.

I looked in the mirror, tapped into my necromancy, and said, “Léna? I know you can’t understand me, but I want to do what I can to help before we leave. Is there something more you need from me?”

I waited a moment, staring into the mirror and seeing only myself—which was not a pretty sight.

“Okay,” I said, giving up. I flicked off the light and then saw something appear in the mirror. Stepping closer, I tried to make it out and recognized the fireplace in the prince’s study.

Léna’s face floated beside the fireplace and she waved me toward her, asking me to go to the prince’s room again. My heart sank. Oh, no. Not that. I glanced over my shoulder at Clive in bed before closing the bathroom door and whispering, “I barely survived last time.”

Léna waved me to her more urgently and then she and the fireplace disappeared.

Shit. Now what was I going to do? The fae axe seemed to have broken the tie to Cadmael, so I didn’t have him to worry about. Hopefully. Vlad—wait. Vlad was up. He could go with me to help if stuff got out of control again.

Feeling better about it, I gave Clive a kiss on the cheek, left the room, and went down the halls to the basement door. Shoot. I didn’t have the ring to trip the door. Well, hell. I knocked instead.

“Vlad?” I called, and then added, “Can you come out and play?”

“Depends,” he said, directly behind me, making me jump, “and shouldn’t you be in bed?”