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“Hit the highlights.”
“Well, Heidar and I met at work—he’d come to bid on something—only my boss—you remember Matt, the gorilla in a suit?” I nodded. Her former boss at Gerald’s did look frighteningly like a shaved ape. “He’d decided to sell me to Sebastian, who’d finally tracked me down, only it didn’t work out quite like they’d planned. Heidar and I escaped into Faerie, but the damned Svarestri attacked us. We got away—you don’t even want to know how—and made it back to New York, but when I stopped by the house, Michael grabbed me for the bounty—” She stopped suddenly, looking stricken.
“Which you failed to mention to me.”
Claire rallied quickly. “I knew how you’d react, Dory! And you don’t know what the family is like. They’re… they can be very bad news.”
“So can I.”
“See!” Claire screeched. “See, I knew that’s what you’d say! You’d have gone stomping off—”
“I don’t stomp.”
“—to see Sebastian, and my slimy excuse for a cousin would have had you killed! He was surrounded by body-guards all the time, the little shit, and most of them were mages. With some of their spells, well, they can take down vamps, you know?”
“And we’re talking about him in the past tense because?”
“Oh, Heidar killed him,” she said, as an afterthought. I decided not to ask or we’d be here all night.
“So Michael kidnapped you and took you where?” I prompted.
“To Sebastian, for the bounty. Only of course Seb was dead and the family was busy fighting over the inheritance and couldn’t be bothered. Michael was actually pissed at me, like I’d asked him to kidnap me or something. But I told him I was carrying a half-Fey child and that its father was the king, and he couldn’t kill me then because the Fey would—”
“Separate his worthless head from his spineless body,” Heidar managed to get in.
“So you aren’t pregnant?” I asked for clarification.
“Um,” Claire said. And stopped.
“Er,” Heidar added, blushing.
I looked between the two of them. Obviously, Caedmon’s story had been off by a generation. Then I recalled something. “A couple of days?!”
“Um, yes, well, it was more like a week, actually—”
I held up a hand. I was soaking and cold and my shoulders hurt. The details I could do without. “Just tell me how you got away from Michael. I know you were at the caves.”
“That place,” Claire said, wrinkling her nose in Virgo disgust for such disorder. “Michael decided to sell me to some dark mages he knew for a null bomb. He figured he could at least get something for his trouble that way, only the mages said they wouldn’t touch me until they checked with the Fey. But Michael had been carting me around for over a day trying to get a paycheck and—”
“Where were you?” I asked Heidar.
He looked sheepish. “I opposed Claire’s wish to return to your home. The Svarestri do not know the human world well, but they have occasionally ventured here. I considered the risk to be—”
“I was only going to leave a quick note,” she said testily.
“So you ditched your only bodyguard with—let’s see—the mages, the vamps and Fey after you?”
“There’s no reason to take that tone, Dory. And anyway, this was before Michael. I didn’t know the vamps were after me, too.”
I let it drop. We were going to have a very long conversation at some point, but not now. “Okay. So you got away from Michael how?”
“I was trying to tell you.” Claire glared me into submission. “So Michael got pissed at the mages, who wouldn’t pay him until they were sure they’d actually be able to harvest me, and he trashed their place. You’ve never seen anything like it. Bodies everywhere, and so much blood and—you know how I feel about blood. I may have passed out.”
I gave her a look. Claire gets nauseous from a paper cut. She sighed. “Okay, I did pass out. And when I woke up, I was being taken to the auction. Michael had found some guys who used to work for the mages who weren’t the kind to ask questions—”
“And Drac found you there.”
“Yes. He just took me; didn’t pay or anything. Then we went to this total rathole of a motel—I mean that literally; it had rats. You could hear them in the walls—” I nodded. Drac must not have wanted to risk my leaking his Bellagio room number to the Senate and moved to the other extreme of the spectrum. “—and one of his men kept eating them, and I said I was going to be sick and went outside and they’d left the keys in the car—”
