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“So you helped me to spite them, not because you warmed to me as a person and a humanbeing?”
“I’m mostly hoping to see your dank tigeragain.”
I assumed dank had evolved—ordevolved—into slang, since Sindari was far from damp and musty. “Gotcha.”
He looked hopefully over atme.
“I don’t usually bring him out to sit in traffic. His time here is limited, so I save him for battles and when I need someone to vent to. He charges less than atherapist.”
“Huh.”
My phone buzzed as we rolled into Seattle proper, city lights glittering next to the dark waters of theSound.
Get out of town if you aren’t already,came in from Willard’s number.There’s an investigation going on at the office, Sudo has brought in MPs and some brass, and I’ve got a guard outside of my hospital door. I don’t know where they think I’m going while I’ve got all these monitors cabled to me, but there’s someone there day and night. And I know Sudo is looking for you. And his car. What trouble are you getting yourself into,Thorvald?
I stared at the screen, worried by the mention of monitors and cables. Had she gotten worse? How much time did I have to figure this out? Or was it already too late? Whatever she’d been given, it couldn’t be some simple poison, not if it causedcancer.
I’m trying to figure out who dosed you and with what,I texted back, deciding there had to be a reason she hadn’t accepted the call. Either she was too sick to speak, or the walls were thin, and she worried about that guard overhearing her.You ever come across anything about dark elves? It looks like someone was in your apartment and spiked your coffee or something you drink regularly with a potion. There was a sigil on the bottom of the vial from the dark-elf alchemical language.It took me three tries to get alchemical out without AutoCorrect inserting something stupid, and I growled at the phone. Maybe my mom wasn’t missing anything by forgoing moderntechnology.
As I told you before, someone may have been in my apartment recently. By the way, is it true that the buildingburned?
Yes, sorry. I got your cat out. She’s staying with my mom inBend.
NorthBend?
No. Bend, Oregon. It was a longdrive.
I’ll bet. Maggie can be vocal in thecar.
You’re a master of understatement, Colonel. FYI, she detestsSindari.
I’m sure. As far as dark elves… they’re around. We’ve never sent you after them because they’re too discreet to get caught kidnapping anyone, but the city morgue always has a few bodies in it that have been mutilated in ritualistic fashion. It’s believed that a lot of the people who disappear in Seattle end up in their lair, but nobody’s ever lived to talk about it. They hide the entrances very well. The police have looked and never foundthem.
Where’s their lair? Do weknow?
The SeattleUnderground.
Uh, I went there on a field trip when I was a kid. It’s a bunch of basements and a couple of spots where you can walk under the street downtown. I wasunderwhelmed.
That’s only a tiny portion of what’s down there. The whole city burned in the late 1800s. Today’s Seattle is built on top of that. All of downtown, and some say there are tunnels that were added later and go under Lake Union and Portage Bay, all the way up into Fremont and the U-District. Every time someone’s started exploring them, city workers die, and access points get cemented in realquick.
I rubbed my face. Why did this sound like a place I was going to end up having tovisit?
But,Willard continued,the dark elves have never given me trouble personally, and if you didn’t know they existed, it seems unlikely that they would be behind this. Even if they had a reason to hate me, why would they come after me and risk bringing the light down into theirtunnels?
To get tome?
Willard was getting the brunt of all this, but I couldn’t help but think someone might want to take both of us out of the picture. If she was gone and Sudo was in charge, I wouldn’t have a job, and I wouldn’t be going after the magical—or so someone might think. I would still kill murdering wyverns even if I wasn’t on anyone’spayroll.
They’ve spent over a hundred years convincing the city that they don’t exist,Willard added.They clearly like it that way. I think it’s more likely that someone found one of their recipe books and made apotion.
That’s what I was thinking. I’ll hope for that. A human dabbler should be easier to find and deal with.I didn’t point out that creating the vial would have required more than a recipe book—that hadn’t been some bauble picked up at Walmart. It had been handblown by an artist. And the glow-in-the-heat sigil was definitelymagical.
Yes. I don’t know where you would go to find an entrance into their portion of theUnderground.
“We’re here.” Dimitri found street parking he could wedge his vaninto.
A homeless guy wearing five coats and pushing a shopping cart eyed Bessy, admiring the galaxy curtains,perhaps.
