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“I never imagined someone like you would be into someone like me.”
He seemed genuinely surprised. “Really? Why not?”
Embarrassed now, I focused on the piece of bread I was shredding into crumbs. With a shrug, I said, “Because guys generally don’t notice me that way, so I don’t expect them to, especially not guys who look like you and who are successful. You could have anyone you wanted, so I don’t expect you to want me.”
The look he gave me nearly stopped my heart with its intensity. “You should see what I see.”
It was a good thing I was sitting down or I might have swooned and hit the ground from the way he said that. I was dying to ask what he saw, but that would have been fishing for compliments. I settled for blinking back tears.
Fortunately, he said without prompting, “You’re intelligent and perceptive, and you’re really lovely in a way that goes straight to your soul. I don’t have to worry about you losing your looks because no matter what changes on the outside—the color of your hair, your skin, your size—it won’t change your essential loveliness.”
Impulsively, I leaned over and kissed him. “And that’s why I love you,” I whispered. “One of many reasons. But, wow.”
He turned bright red and abruptly changed the subject. “Do you want to get dessert?”
“Not now. Maybe we’ll stumble across a place that looks good on our way home, and then I’ll be hungrier for it.” Plus, at the moment my stomach was too busy doing cartwheels of joy for me to imagine eating anything.
We left the restaurant snuggled together, his arm around my shoulders. “I think this has been the best first date I’ve ever been on,” I said. Well, aside from having a creepy audience the whole time, but at least the restaurant didn’t burn down and a fight didn’t break out. Even better, McClusky seemed to have given up on catching Owen doing something evil and had left after he finished his dinner.
“It was good, wasn’t it? We’ll have to do it again. Not the first date part. We can’t do that again. But another date, yes.” He sounded as flustered as I felt.
We walked in the general direction of my apartment, and then at one corner he stopped, turned to face me, and kissed me. Just when I was getting into it, he whispered in my ear, “We must have done a pretty good job of convincing him we’re not a danger because our friend is heading in a different direction.”
“Time to turn the tables?”
“You’re reading my mind.”
We lingered a few moments more, then turned and headed down the crosstown street Mr. Gray had taken, keeping far enough behind him that he wouldn’t spot us. The streets weren’t terribly crowded, but there were enough people out to allow us to blend in, though I wondered if they were real or illusion. Surely there weren’t that many people imprisoned here. If they were illusions, would he know the difference between the illusions and us? We might have been more conspicuous than we thought.
But he didn’t seem to notice us as he turned to go uptown. We were getting close to the prison’s boundaries, where we’d looped back to Lincoln Center, but he didn’t slow down. At the last crosstown street, he turned again and headed into a tiny park on the corner, one of those Manhattan pocket parks filling the gap where a building once had been. There was a tall fence around the park and a gate that closed and locked behind him.
“Maybe this is the way out,” I said, grasping Owen’s arm.
We hurried to the gate. Owen made short work of the lock, and then we slipped into the park. The gateway to the park was approximately at the prison’s boundary, but we didn’t find ourselves back in Lincoln Center. We were in a park that should have been barely the size of a single brownstone, but instead it was a vast, lush garden. It was as dark in there as it had been in the city, the trees casting mysterious shadows.
“This must be where their entry point is,” Owen breathed. “We’re in the elven realms now, their more natural state.”
“You mean, this is the prison gate? The way out?”
“The way out into the elven realms,” he specified.
“But wouldn’t that be where the portal is?”
“Presumably, but I don’t think they’ll let us just wander around until we find it.” As if to prove him right, we came out of a stand of trees and nearly ran into a bunch of the gray guys, who seemed to be having a meeting. I felt a slight tingle of magic as Owen must have veiled us just in time before any of them turned our way. We scuttled behind some bushes, then crept our way to the park entrance, staying hidden as more gray guys joined the meeting.
Only when we were safely on the other side of the gate and well away from that block did either of us breathe normally again. “Okay, that was a close call,” I said with deep feeling.
“Yes, but worth it. We seem to have found the way out of the prison and into the elven lands, and maybe that was a guard shift change meeting.”
“Does that do us much good?”
He shrugged. “It’s information, and the more we have, the better. We know a spot we should probably watch, and if that was a shift change, then that’s a possible weak spot in their schedule that we might be able to exploit. I’ll have to report this to Mac in the morning.”
He took my arm and we started heading for my apartment. “Are you okay with reporting to him?” I asked.
“Why shouldn’t I be? He works at the Council level, so he outranks me, and he’s more experienced at this kind of thing—not that anyone’s really experienced at being held prisoner in another realm, but I’m mostly a laboratory guy. And I think everyone else will be more comfortable with someone other than me in charge. I’ll probably come out of this better if I’m a good little soldier instead of trying to be a general. It’s a chance for me to maybe earn some trust.”
I squeezed his arm. “It’ll be okay, I’m sure. Anyone who really knows you has to know you’re not even remotely evil.”
