“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—”
“They didn’t have wards around the place?” As soon as I said it, I realized how stupid that was.
Claire raised an eyebrow, dislodging some water from her bangs, which ran into her eyes. “Damn contacts! That’s the other reason I had to go home; I haven’t been able to see anything for days. ‘Extended wear,’ my ass,” she mumbled, fishing around in her purse for a pair of glasses.
“And you found me how?”
“I didn’t. That’s why I was so surprised to see you. Of course, I told Heidar all about you”—she thumped him again—“and said you might catch up with us sooner or later, but he never listens, and anyway, if you’d checked the answering machine, you’d have already known I was okay. I left—I don’t know—like, ten messages, starting last night—”
“I’ve been kind of busy.”
“And you never answer your cell phone.”
“My cell had a little accident.”
“Anyway, I found Heidar lurking around the motel—he’d found me but couldn’t get through the wards—and we drove around until we saw this great hotel that does tours of the vineyards. Then I remembered when I was looking at that magazine article about the wine country, you said your uncle had a house around here, and I thought maybe he’d know where to find you. So we asked around and here we are.”
I looked into her triumphant face and found myself utterly speechless. She’d been on a tour of the wine country. While half of Faerie chased her and I went slowly out of my mind, she’d been eating crackers and debating the merits of last season’s merlot.
I finally managed to unclench my jaws enough for speech. “Claire. This is very important. Did you accidentally take down the wards when you arrived?”
“What wards?”
“You might not have noticed, but Radu has a rather elaborate ward system.”