Page 35 of Crown of the Fae King

Everly’s face lit up. “Luggage! You’re going to need luggage!”

We gathered in a circle. The men took our bags, and we all linked arms. We took a quick look at the surrounding windows, and when Wickham was satisfied no one was watching, we disappeared.

We reappearedbehind two massive dumpsters that smelled like a carcass, but it wasn’t the smell that brought up my stomach, it was the disorientation of moving without actually moving. While I threw up in the gutter, Everly hurried everyone else away, not to give me privacy, but to make sure those smells didn’t attach themselves to our new purchases. I finished spitting and forced my feet to move so it didn’t attach to me either. The five of them stood at the end of the street and watched with pity as I staggered toward them.

“Don’t worry,” Everly told them, as I came within earshot. “I’ll give her the rest of the day off. Her makeover can wait until tomorrow.”

So…it was more than just my clothes that weren’t up to par.

“Don’t thinkof it as pizza.” Persi shouldered close and took a slice out of the box in front of me. “Think of it as a tomato sauce sandwich. The cheese and the rest are just bonuses. You’re lucky there’s much on them at all.”

Tomato sauce sandwich, I told my stomach.Brace yourself.

Persi and I joined the others in the living room, plates in hand.

“The puddle of blood confounds me,” Urban was saying. “Why remove it only to spill it? Why not drain her on the spot and leave it there. Even if we were dealing with vampires, they wouldn’t have left it behind, aye?” He followed this with a big bite of tomato-covered food, and I realized I really had to toughen up to run with this crowd.

The mention of vampires, though, made me laugh. “You can’t be serious. About the vampires.”

Wickham chuckled. “Nay, lass. No vampires…at least, not the traditional sort. But the Fae folk species are various. Only a few are widely known. Most prefer their own realms, and even those who would come into ours dinnae have the power to do it. They must be brought by one of the more elite. We suspect this O’Ryan must be one such, and now he has brought more than one species to do his biddin’.

“In the past five years, including this morning, he and his minions have killed eleven sets of witches in various cities. The first was in Oxford, England. Everly caught two of them red handed and killed them. Their bodies were summoned back to Fairy as if to hide the evidence.”

“Back to Fairy?”

“The fairy realm.”

I looked at Everly in a new light. Her husband might treat her like she’s made of glass, but she was a serious bad ass. Which also meant, sadly, that she hadn’t been joking about the karate.

“We’ve been trying to catch them again, to take one alive if possible,” she said, “to get to O’Ryan. But it’s impossible to anticipate where they will hit next. And Muir witches are spread throughout the world.”

From my memory, I pulled up an old map I’d had pinned to my dorm wall, when I’d been dating a geography major. “So…Oxford, England. Where next?”

Urban and Everly worked out a list, including Brighton in England, Nantes and Saintes in France, Valencia in Spain, one in Ghana. Then Barcelona, Paris, and Algeria, and after a long stretch, Milan, Italy.

“And the one in London,” Urban amended.

I could see it all clearly. “In that order?”

“Nay, not strictly in that order. Brighton happened after Oxford, but before London, then none in England after the one in Nantes. We thought they were moving north to south, but then the two in Spain happened before Saintes. And why would they go back to Barcelona, then Paris, and back to Algeria when they’d been in Ghana before?”

“Because it’s not just north to south,” I said, then looked around to see if anyone else might be thinking the same thing I was. “If you look at a map, the two in France are a little off course, but both cities are fairly close to Bordeaux, right?”

Wickham sat forward, scowling. “Aye. Both.”

“And if you think about it, he might have been spreading his…monsters…out a little. The ones in Spain might have been successful before the ones in Saintes found the witches they were looking for.”

“Logical. Aye.” Wickham waited. I was still surprised he hadn’t thought of it.

“It’s methodical. If I needed to search the entire earth, I’d have to be organized, somehow. I’d pick a starting point, then sweep up and down.” I made a painting motion, down and up, down and up, moving a little each time. “The Prime Meridian is kind of a poetic place to start, don’t you think? If I had to guess, you’ve missed some attacks in the Netherlands and Norway. Milan is probably on about the 9thMeridian East, so—"

Wickham was suddenly in front of me, his hands on my upper arms, pulling me out of my chair. He searched my eyes like his life depended on it. “Are ye playin’ with me?”

I didn’t mean to laugh in his face. It just came out when I was nervous, and standing that close to him would make anyone nervous.

“I dated a geography major who used to drill on stuff like this. Most of the cities they listed are on the Prime Meridian.” I rattled them off like I’d done a hundred times before, just a long time ago. Apparently, my tongue had some muscle memory. “Peterborough, London, Brighton, Bordeaux, Zaragoza, Valencia, Tamale and Accra…in Ghana. What are the chances—"

Wickham wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me so hard I couldn’t breathe, but I wasn’t about to complain about it, even if I ended up passing out.

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