Naughty stories that she ought not to…

Amelia’s brow furrowed as she considered what he’d said. Who was this lunatic, and what incriminating information did he think she had? She blinked hard, willing the hazy crust of drug-induced sleep to clear on its own. She still couldn’t move her arms or legs, and the damp wad in her mouth was sickening.

But the man was still watching her.

Stories.

Of course she had stories; she was a librarian for Tarraven’s sake! Even without her Hoard, she knew more stories than most people would know what to do with. But nothing dangerous. Charles was careful to never share information that could put her safety at risk. She didn’t know anything about the Valehaven underworld that wasn’t fit for public record.

Unless… not Charles?

The man from the library.

But he didn’t seem like part of the underworld. He seemed like an unfortunate soul who needed a shower, a hot meal, and a recovery meeting — in that order. Besides, he hadn’t told her anything, not even his own name. Sure, he’d given her a bunch of paper snippets glued together like a serial killer’s arts and crafts project. They included some names and maybe an unsettling poem that didn’t make any sense, but only if she’d assembled it correctly, and she still couldn’t prove that she had.

Whatever this man thought she knew — she didn’t. He was terribly, horribly mistaken.

The man stepped out of the proverbial shadows, and Amelia shrank back slightly, her instincts screaming “DANGER DANGER DANGER” in flashing neon lights. Her dragon form snapped and hissed against whatever devilry was holding her back. She prodded gently at that metallic sensation again and felt a whine slip out of the back of her throat. Whatever they’d stabbed into her neck was as effective as it was painful. There would be no shifting and no dragon fire until she figured out what this was and how to fix it.

And that — not being able to protect herself like she’d always done — was far more frightening than the man before her.

Because aside from her current predicament and his creepy choice of words, there wasn’t much to implicate the speaker as a threat. He seemed… normal. Good-looking, but not in a dazzling super villain way. More like a clean-cut accountant with angular features, dark hair, and a neat but reasonably priced haircut. He was tall and lean and wore his slim-cut jeans and dark gray T-shirt well, though he certainly didn’t fill out the sleeves in a way that would suggest he could snap her like a twig. That was comforting. Kind of.

By far the strangest part of his appearance was the small finch that rode on his shoulder — yellow-breasted with tan and white speckled wings. A weird animal companion for a villain, she couldn’t help but note. She’d have expected a fluffy white cat. Or a snake.

Amelia’s hazy gaze flicked over the man’s features one more time, desperately looking for a hint of just who had taken…

There.

It was the eyes. The shimmery silver of faerie irises could be camouflaged by color contacts the same way Amelia’s luminescent amber ones could, but there was always a faint ring of light around the edges. She’d bet her first-edition copy of Ber’ramus the Bard that this man’s eyes weren’t naturally brown like they now appeared. To confirm her hypothesis, her eyes darted to his ears to check for sharp tapers. She breathed in sharply through her nose before she could stop herself.

His ears were blunted. But not like a human or shifter with a smooth rounded curve. Someone had cut off the tips to form brutal squares. They were scarred over with tight red skin that didn’t look fresh, but still seemed terribly painful.

The man’s expression darkened. He’d seen her looking.

“Awful, isn’t it?” he asked conversationally, his smooth baritone voice sounding far too rich and dark for this bland, sterile room. The man began examining his nails as he continued. “But that’s not a story you’ve earned, little dragon. I’ll be the one asking the questions, if you don’t mind.” He looked back up and pinned her with a stern gaze.

She hadn’t asked anything, of course. Even if she’d been able to, she wouldn’t have. She’d read this scene before and she wasn’t stupid.

The man strolled forward and leaned down, hands on the armrests just in front of her bound wrists. He loomed over Amelia, examining her for a moment that felt like forever with intelligent, calculating eyes. She felt as if he were trying to pry secrets out of her head through sheer force of will. For a moment, she almost wondered if he could.

The man abruptly reached forward with one long-fingered hand and tore the putrid rag out of her mouth. Amelia gasped, choked on her own spit, and proceeded to cough violently.

A dwarf she hadn’t noticed earlier stepped forward, taking the rag from the man and offering him a lemon-scented wet wipe. The fae man wiped his fingers and dropped the towelette into the dwarf’s waiting hand, all without taking his eyes from Amelia.

“I am not a hard man, little dragon,” said the fae. “I merely protect my… assets. Surely you can understand.”

He waited like she was supposed to respond.

“I…” she began, not knowing what she even was supposed to say. Rotshard, her voice sounded terrible.

“Gunthalg,” said the fae man, disgust coloring his tone for the first time. “Get our guest a drink. She’s parched.”

Gunthalg reappeared a moment later with a plastic bottle of water. Halfheartedly, Amelia hoped they might unbind her wrists so she could hold it herself. She was offered no such dignity. The dwarf held the bottle to her lips and Amelia drank, dribbling some of the liquid down her chin in the process.

“Very good,” said the fae man. “Now let’s begin. How much do you know about Serinus and who told you?”

“I…” began Amelia again. “Nothing,” she finished honestly. “I don’t know anything.”

The man waited, eyes narrowing dangerously. Amelia wracked her brains, still feeling hazy from whatever they’d used to knock her out. “Serinus” did sound familiar, but she couldn’t have said why. And with how much she read, it truly could have been from any number of things.

“Some weirdo came to my library yesterday,” she continued, desperately hoping she could explain that it wasn’t what it looked like — assuming they’d been spied on like the mute man from the library seemed to fear. “Or… the day before? I don’t know what time it is. Or what day it is.”

The man continued to stare at her silently.

“He gave me a bag of really unhinged notes, but I don’t think any of them said Serinus. I don’t even know what they meant, I swear. You’ve got the wrong girl.”

The man looked at Amelia for another handful of breaths with an unreadable expression. He certainly didn’t seem angry. Maybe… maybe he believed her?

He produced a knife from his pocket, flipped it open, and stabbed the golden blade directly into Amelia’s arm, pinning her even more firmly to the chair.

Amelia screamed.

The fae remained expressionless, then leaned in close when she stopped for breath and murmured gently into her ear, “I said, who told you?”

***

Charles sat on a hard metal chair in interrogation room #4, which he’d claimed for his own, watching the security footage from Gellivar’s Family Market again, and again, and again. He practically had it memorized by now, but willed himself to notice something new all the same.

The black minivan pulls in, looking for all the worlds like some suburban family grabbing dinner. They wait. Then Amelia’s exiting the store. Her honey-colored waves bounce as she walks, and her yellow cardigan stands out against the drab blacks and grays of the parking lot. Two figures exit the black minivan, both wearing dark gray hoodies and gloves — a minotaur and someone else who looks slender enough to be either a tall human woman or a short fae man. Amelia loads two bags of groceries into the passenger seat of her blue pickup, then turns and looks for a cart corral. The two dark figures slip casually around the back of a silver car. Marching towards the cart corral, Amelia stops and looks around, clearly suspicious. Noticing a unicorn-raccoon she says something, looks around again, returns her cart, reaches up to her ear… and smiles.

Charles tapped the laptop’s space bar, pausing the video. Even in the low-quality security footage, he knew that dazzling smile. Something was happening in her book and she’d guessed it from the start. She was smug that she’d been right. What he wouldn’t give now to guess what came next the way his wife always seemed to in her stories.

Charles knew there was no way to know. No way to protect her. But…

“Just keep her until I get there,” he murmured, hoping the Blood Bearer, the maker of worlds and creator of portals, wasn’t too busy maintaining the universe to listen. “Help me find her,” he begged.

It’d been a long time since he asked for anything. Ever since that day two years ago… it’d been hard to think about blood. Let alone speak to the god of it.

His eyes began to burn with emotion and lack of sleep, and he rubbed them with the thumb and pointer finger of one weary hand, then tapped the space bar again.

Amelia turns, the minotaur grabs her, the slender figure stabs her in the neck with a syringe… and she’s gone.

The door to the interrogation room opened and Charles was not surprised to see Samuel there with a plastic bag of what smelled like food. His cropped dark blonde hair was a mess and his blue eyes looked tired. He was wearing a fresh shirt, but didn’t appear to have showered. Samuel kicked the door shut, then a gas station burrito and an off-brand energy drink were unceremoniously slammed on the table in front of Charles, making his papers flutter. It was… kind of food.

“Eat,” commanded the other man, glaring at Charles like he’d committed some grave sin. “Millie’s going to have my hide if I let you starve before we find her.”

“It’s been forty six hours, Smirk,” whispered Charles, afraid to say it any louder. As if that’d make it more real.

Samuel’s eyes softened. “I know,” he said. “And we’re doing all we can. She wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself, and you can’t look at all if you collapse. You’re already not sleeping. Eat.”

Charles nodded numbly and peeled back the paper-backed foil. He was hungry enough that it didn’t smell entirely awful, even if his stomach was still queasy with fear.

They were indeed doing everything they could.

He’d discovered the abduction site easily, as the girl from the library had said something about Amelia making curry and Gellivar’s was the only grocery store in Upper Valehaven that stocked her preferred brand of curry paste. They’d marked off the crime scene, issued a BOLO for the black minivan, and sent beat cops to establish a perimeter. They reviewed the security footage from the grocery store and the library, then they conducted dozens of interviews; no one recognized the minotaur or the slender figure. One woman had seen the abduction happen, but she’d been with her young children and couldn’t have done anything about it. She’d called the police to report it shortly after Charles had arrived at the station. Gellivar’s parking lot had been scoured for evidence and Charles had even sent a team to fingerprint his own home — just in case. The Crypticonsortium was informed, and Amelia’s cheerily grinning picture was currently on blast throughout Valehaven. Her phone was either broken or dead, because they couldn’t get a trace of it. So far lab results were coming back useless, and the department was stretching thin.

Samuel sat on the chair across from him and pulled out his phone as Charles worked on his food, peering over the top of it to make sure his friend kept eating.

The VPD couldn’t use all their resources on one case indefinitely while crime continued throughout the rest of the city. He knew that, but…

“Hospitals in Lower Valehaven are feeling the strain as an unseasonably aggressive chest cold ravages the young and old,” said the carefully curated voice of a news anchor from inside Samuel’s phone. “Folks, please be sure to wash your hands, and avoid public places if you’re feeling unwell. Next week the…”

Samuel closed his news app, tossed his phone on the paper-strewn table, and shook his head. “Just more on the cold,” he said. “But they’re still running her picture at the bottom of the screen so people should be on the lookout.”

Charles nodded silently as he finished his burrito and cracked open the energy drink. He raised it to his lips when a paper on the table caught his eye. Samuel’s phone had knocked over a haphazard pile of reports, and a previously dismissed manila envelope was spilling across the rest of the mess.

They were printouts of the clues Amelia had assembled the day before she was taken. Naturally he’d already considered it might be connected, but he hadn’t known how to decipher…

“Now the djinn takes his meals with a sick, sly delight.”

He was standing with the papers in his hand before he realized he’d come to a decision. This was insane. Beyond reckless. There was good reason no one had even considered it.

He didn’t care.

“Chuckles?” asked Samuel, standing and grabbing the abandoned drink before it could spill on the files.

But Charles was already running, the doorway behind him flung wide as he charged down the hall to the chief’s office. He burst inside without knocking, and the stern gray woman looked up from her computer, raising one severe eyebrow.

“Kevrinhart. What’ve you got?”

“I need the Governor on the phone,” Charles gasped. “He’s got to clear visitation with the warden at Northwatch. I don’t know where she is, but I think I know who can help me. And you’re not gonna like it.”