No Quest for the Wicked (23 page)

The elves had reached us and one even had a grip on my arm when a noise in the bushes beside the path startled me. I thought at first it was just some animal, but then something sprang out of the bushes onto the path with a bloodcurdling war cry. When it went on to shout, “Sneaky, greedy, cheap elves!” I knew it had to be Thor. I wasn’t sure, though, if he was attacking the elves or coming after the brooch. I jumped out of the way, just in case, and he ran past me into the group of elves. He swung his tiny battleaxe with a vengeance, but it didn’t seem like he actually hit anything. The elves jumped nimbly out of the way before he could hit them, and then it took him a while to recover after the momentum from each blow swung him around in a circle.

Something dark came out of the sky, and I dove for the nearest bush. After so many attacks by the antique zombie gargoyles, I wasn’t taking any chances. This one must have been one of ours, though, because it went for the elves. In the darkness, it was difficult to follow the fight. All I could see was a swarm of shadows. After taking down Sylvester, Owen guarded me, but at the moment, everyone was more focused on fighting each other than on going after the brooch. In fact, I wasn’t sure they’d yet figured out which one of us actually had the brooch, only that it was in the vicinity.

The sound of heavy breathing nearby jolted me out of my hiding place. “It’s here, it’s here, it’s here,” Sylvester muttered, sounding more and more unhinged. He pounced on the spot where I’d been just a second earlier. At that sound, Owen whirled away from watching the fight to pull me to my feet and away from the bush. Sylvester still came after me, his hands stretched out ahead of him and his fingers bent into claws. “It’s mine,” he rasped.

“Back off, buddy!” I ordered, on the off chance that I could use the Eye on other people even if it didn’t affect me. It didn’t work, or else Sylvester was too far gone under the power of the Eye itself to fall under the sway of the Eye’s holder. He kept advancing, and when Owen and I fled from him, we nearly bumped into Lyle.

There was a loud popping sound, and I felt magic nearby as Sylvester suddenly swayed, then collapsed. Rod stood behind him. “Sorry it took me so long,” he said. “I was trying to remember a spell that might work on an elf. Now, come on, we need to get out of here.”

We evaded Lyle, only to find ourselves facing Earl. Rod flexed his wrists, preparing to fight, but then Earl grinned and joined us, shouting over his shoulder, “Help! I’m being kidnapped!”

“Are you
trying
to make them come after us?” I asked him.

“Do you really think they’d come to rescue me?” he replied without breaking stride. “I was just coming up with an excuse to leave.”

We followed Rod into a rough, rocky, hilly area that felt like it was in the middle of the wilderness. I could still see the city skyline, so I knew we hadn’t somehow teleported out of the park without me noticing. We stopped in a secluded area surrounded by trees. There were some large rocks, just the right size to sit on, and I availed myself of one of them because I wasn’t sure my legs would hold me up any longer.

“I thought I said we didn’t need help,” Owen said, facing Rod.

“Yeah, but what I saw was you two with a bunch of elves on your tails. Admit it, you need us. You won’t last another five minutes without magical support, let alone an hour or more.”

“But who’s going to help us against all of you?” Owen asked, his voice soft and solemn.

“Thor’s having too much fun fighting elves to remember to come after the brooch, Earl just wants to keep it away from Sylvester, and you can tranquilize me if you have to. Remember, I came on this jaunt with that understanding.”

We went on the alert when we heard a slight crunching sound, like footsteps on the rocky ground. “I’ve set some wards that may confuse them for a moment,” Granny’s voice said as she entered our hideout.

“Good thinking,” Rod said.

Then I yelped as the end of her cane poked into my shoulder. “And as for you, young lady, I told you I wasn’t letting you out of my sight, and there you went, rushing off on your own and getting yourself into trouble.”

“What was I supposed to do?” I protested. “As soon as I got the brooch, I had to get out of there. If I’d gone back to get you I’d have been in even worse trouble.”

“And obviously you avoided all trouble by leaving on your own,” she said, and I could hear the smirk in her voice even if I couldn’t see it in the darkness.

Owen sat next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. “The guests were already arriving, and we had a close call with a couple of them,” he said. “I’m not sure what we’d have done if we’d had to face the guests, the puritans, the gargoyles, the elves, Thor, and Mimi, all at the same time. You held back some of them, so you were helping even if you weren’t with us.”

That mollified her somewhat. She still made a loud “Hmmmph” sound, but she dropped the argument and quit poking me with her cane.

After a few minutes of rest, I asked, “Will Thor be okay? It’s just him against all those elves.”

“And Sam,” Rod reminded me. “Sam won’t let him do anything too stupid, and we need Thor to keep the elves off us. They and the puritans are our biggest dangers. The power-broker types will only be strangely compelled. They won’t actively seek it.”

“How are you holding up?” Owen asked him. “Will I need the dart anytime soon?”

“I won’t lie to you and say that I don’t want that thing, but I can fight it. I’m getting some pretty vivid mental images of what I could do if I had it, and I think it might be whispering to me.”

“Ew!” I said with a wince, then asked, “What’s it saying?”

“It’s hard to describe. Picture that little cartoon devil that sits on your shoulder. It’s like that, not so much words as ideas, playing to all my deepest desires.”

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t share any details,” Owen said, and I felt him shudder. “I heard way too much about your deepest desires when we were in high school.”

“Not
those
deepest desires. Well, okay, maybe a few, but only because power does tend to draw beautiful women. I have to admit, it paints a really pretty mental picture.”

“It whispers to me, too, but I am choosing not to listen.” Earl said. “I am focused on my aim to keep Sylvester from having it.”

“And I already told you I don’t care much for that kind of power,” Granny said. “I’ve got a mission of my own.”

“Do you think this is the danger you predicted?” I asked. “Me in possession of this horrible thing that draws people to it and makes them thirst for power, but not getting the magical protection it gives other people?”

“No, don’t think so.”

“There’s something worse than this?” I turned to Owen. “How much longer should we have to wait?”

Owen checked the luminous dial of his watch. “I know it’s hard to believe, but it hasn’t been that long. We still have almost an hour, and that was only an estimate.”

“Then how long do you think we can hole up here before someone finds us?”

“That’ll depend …” Rod started to say before a soft rustling sound in the grass distracted him. The sound grew louder, and soon a faint glow spread out on the ground around the rock where Owen and I sat. I pulled my legs up and then climbed to stand on the rock. Owen joined me, his arm securely around me as we watched the glow build. Rod and Earl jumped onto nearby rocks, but Granny stood her ground. Oddly, the glow kept a safe distance from her.

“What kind of spell is this?” I asked frantically as the glow surrounded our rock.

“I don’t know!” Owen said. “I don’t recognize it.”

“A seeking spell, maybe?” Rod asked. “Was there anything like it in your medieval book?”

“No, nothing like this. I don’t think it’s the puritans trying to find the brooch.”

“It’s not a spell,” Granny said.

Now I could see that the glow wasn’t an unbroken mass. It was made up of lots of tiny little lights, and each of those little lights was a creature. I’d seen beings like this, back home, when we’d enlisted the local magical folk to help us fight the bad guys. They were the nature spirits, what my grandmother called the wee folk, but I hadn’t realized there were any in New York. Yet, here they were.

And they were all kneeling at the base of my rock.

A whispering sound rose into the air, like the sound a soft breeze makes when it blows through pine trees. After listening for a while, I was able to discern words. “Hail to thee, our queen!” they said over and over again as they bowed.

“You’ve got a fan club,” Rod quipped.

“They must have been drawn by the Eye,” Owen said, more seriously. “It seems to be an instinctive response. Small creatures like this can’t help but respond to power.”

“Will they try to take it away from me?” I asked, my flesh crawling as I imagined these things swarming over me to get to the brooch in my pocket. I thought that might be even more unpleasant than being tackled by Mimi.

“I don’t think so,” Owen said. “They’re probably just basking in the proximity of the great power.”

“It’s still freaky,” I said. “You’re sure they’re not dangerous?”

“Well, there is the possibility that they may draw the attention of other magical things,” Owen said. “They’ve pretty much created a big, glowing ‘Hey, over here!’ sign that’s visible from the air.”

I instinctively looked up for signs of the zombie gargoyles. “Would it be rude to make them go away?”

“Try it. They think you’re their queen.”

“But the brooch doesn’t work for me,” I protested.

“Still, try it.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Rod added. “I’m torn between trying to take the brooch away from you and worshiping you, myself.”

I whirled to him, waving my fist. I would have lost my balance on the rock if Owen hadn’t steadied me. “Don’t even think about it!”

“And now I no longer want to worship you. See, it works! Now, try it on them.”

“Okay, then,” I muttered as I thought of what to say. I’d never been good at speeches. “Um, thank you all for coming,” I said. “It’s very kind of you. But you don’t need to worship me. You can run along now.”

Nothing happened. They just kept up that whispering and glowing. I never thought I’d be irritated with being worshipped.

“You don’t have to be nice to them,” Owen said. “They think you’re their queen. Queens aren’t nice. Pretend you’re Mimi.”

“If I do that, they’ll shoot me with their tiny bows and arrows.”

“No, they won’t. Remember, you’re their queen. You have power over them.”

“Okay, then. Your homage is noted,” I said as pompously as I could while keeping a straight face. “Now, be gone! Leave me!” That wasn’t any more effective. I turned to Owen. “Maybe I should give you the brooch and let you try.”

He flinched. “I don’t want to touch that thing.”

“It can’t be any more dangerous for you than it is for me.” I studied him for a moment, trying to read what I could see of his face in the eerie glow of all the little magical creatures on the ground. “Or are you feeling something from it? I know you want your powers back, but this would be really bad timing.”

“No, but if I ever even act like I want the Eye, with or without powers, there will be plenty of people who think I’m trying to take over the world.”

I gestured around us. “There’s nobody here but us!”

“That we know of. I’m pretty sure I’m being watched, all the time, by officials and by other people, and the moment I show any sign of doing anything even remotely suspicious, they’ll probably just shoot me without asking questions.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

“Not really,” Rod said. “He
is
being watched.”

“Then if they won’t listen to me, what do we do? If anyone’s searching for us by air, they’ll have found us by now.”

Granny banged her cane on the ground and shouted, “Oh, get out of here! Shoo!” The glow receded rapidly, flowing away from us until there was no sign it had ever been there. When the rest of us turned to look at Granny, she shrugged and said, “It’s all in the tone of voice. I deal with these folk all the time, though yours aren’t as sophisticated as the ones we’ve got back home. Ours would have argued with me for a while or demanded a gift instead of just leaving.”

I laughed. “You know, that may be the first time someone called something from a small Texas town more sophisticated—” I broke off as something came at me out of the sky, knocking me off the rock. I hit the ground hard, landing on the brooch, and that caused such a sharp pain that I cried out. The fall had knocked the wind out of me, though, so my cry came out as a mere gasp.

I was so dazed that I only got a vague sense of the others running around and shouting. I felt the ground shake slightly and heard a loud thud as something hit the ground hard, as though from a great height, nearby.

Then someone took me by the shoulders and shouted my name. I started to fight off my assailant, then realized it was Owen. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I landed on the brooch,” I said, wincing and shifting my weight so the brooch wasn’t pressed against my hip. “I have a feeling I’ll have a very interesting bruise in the morning.”

He chuckled and started to help me to my feet, but then Rod shouted, “Incoming! They didn’t just send the one.”

“I hate these things,” I muttered into Owen’s shoulder as he pressed me back into the ground, sheltering me from the attacking zombie gargoyles.

“You two find cover,” Rod ordered. “We’ll deal with them.”

We moved in a crouch toward a cluster of trees, weaving our way across the clearing like we were crossing a battlefield. I had the strangest feeling that we were being followed. When I turned to look, I saw that Rod was right behind us.

“Rod!” I shouted. “You’re supposed to be fighting them, not following us!”

He froze, then shook his head. “Sorry! Fighting, yeah, that’s it.” Without another word, he turned and ran back to where Granny and Earl were fending off the attacking gargoyles.

“That’s not a good sign,” Owen said softly before leading me to an entirely different group of trees.

“Maybe we should take this chance to go off on our own again,” I suggested.