On The Prowl

He rolled down his window, but that only made things worse. The driver of the SUV and a motorcycle messenger boy soon joined the woman, worshipping at the new shrine of Heidar. "Do something!" I hissed frantically.

"I'm Alma," the woman breamed, drinking him in with her eyes. "I work for Manhattan Models, and I have to tell you, my boss would offer you a contract before you finished walking through the door! Let me give you my card – "

"I'm Steve," the SUV guy said, thrusting a hand in the window and trying to muscle Alma out of the way. "I'm a freelance photographer, and buddy, could you and I make a mint! We gotta talk – "

He was cut off by a precisely aimed elbow to the ribs. Yeah, Alma was a native. "Back off, I saw him first!"

"It's a free country, lady," Steve gasped, and grabbed for the window ledge. That resulted in a tug of war that landed them in a scuffling fight outside our car. The motorcycle messenger quietly took their place. He didn't say anything, even to introduce himself, just stood there staring at Heidar with a look of wonder.

"I'm open to suggestions," Heidar informed me dryly.

"Do a glamour!" I whispered, having just sighted a red-and-blue light weaving its way toward us. It was pretty far back, but the cop was on a motorcycle, meaning he would be here soon even if the line didn't move. Come on, I thought desperately, how long had we been sitting here? I hit the horn. "Let's move, people!"

"Your power makes working any magic much more difficult," Heidar reminded me. "We don't know what we'll find at the auction house. I ca

Tanet caught my eye in the mirror and gri

"We aren't going to find anything if we're in jail!" I said. The delivery van in front of me lurched forward a few yards, and I followed on its bumper. Heidar's congregation jogged after us, their vehicles abandoned in their wake.

Alma, looking ruffled and with a tear in her blouse, reached us first. She shoved a card in Heidar's face. "My business number is on the front, but wait – let me give you my home number, too." She started searching frantically in her purse for a pen. "Call me anytime, I mean that!" I noticed her wedding ring and wondered how much her husband would appreciate getting a midnight message from a male client, but the thought didn't appear to faze Alma. Or maybe it simply hadn't occurred to her. She looked pretty bemused.

"The human authorities are the least of our worries," Heidar intoned darkly.

"Fine. Explain that to the cop who's two cars back," I told him, wondering if it was time to cut and run. I really could walk faster than traffic was moving.

Alma's hand brushed Heidar's as she scribbled down her number, and that slight touch seemed to seriously up the amplitude on her fascination. She started trying to crawl through the window, but Steve jerked her away. A couple of matronly ladies in a nearby Volvo began craning their necks to see what all the commotion was about and I got a sudden vision of us besieged by love-struck grandmas.

"Damn it, Heidar, help me!"

"What seems to be the trouble here?" One of New York's finest had pulled up beside us and was attempting to see inside the car. Tanet had just torn off another rat's head in the backseat and was crunching it contentedly. I let my head fall forward onto the steering wheel.

"We require assistance," Heidar told the policeman.

"Yes, sir! And what can I do to help?" I looked up to find the policeman staring at Heidar with the same look of slavish devotion everyone else seemed to be wearing.

"The vehicles do not move," Heidar explained, gesturing at the long line ahead of us.

"I'll see what can be done about your problem, sir!" The cop strode away like a man on a mission and remounted his motorcycle. I watched in complete bewilderment as he turned on his siren and started clearing a path through the crowd, ignoring the fact that Heidar continued to hold court with a growing number of admirers in the middle of the bridge.

"Do the damn glamourie," I whispered, as the two old ladies in the Volvo began blowing him kisses.

I'd barely finished speaking when the florist van ahead of us suddenly burst its seams, engulfed by large climbing vines that broke through the back doors and grew upward from the undercarriage. As if that wasn't enough, a flood of hothouse blooms exploded out of the back, slapping us with a rain of rose petals that made the car's automatic wipers switch on.

I turned them off, and shot Heidar a look.

"You have two magical natures now," he reminded me. "Your power is subsequently greater."

"So?"

"I, er, overcompensated."

We'd discovered that Heidar's dual nature was the reason my power hadn't originally had much effect on him. The human part of him had blocked it from reaching his Fey magic, but now that my Fey half was out and about, he was having some of the same problems that everyone else did. It was only one of a number of issues in our new relationship, most of which involved families who cordially loathed each other. I was still hoping for a fairy-tale ending, but was starting to suspect we'd have to work for it.

We inched around the destroyed van with the help of our new police escort, who also insured that we reached the auction house in record time. He sat on his motorcycle, scratching his head and looking around uncertainly. He was probably wondering what we were doing at a dilapidated warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront without so much as a nearby deli to explain its allure. I stayed in the car until Heidar worked his magic on the man's mind and he left happy. Then Tanet and I piled out onto the asphalt.

It was high noon, chosen because the trolls and vamps would be asleep. That didn't mean there wouldn't be security, of course, but after several years on the payroll, I knew Gerald's as well as anyone. Which probably explained why my palms were sweating.

"He uses booby traps in daytime," I told the rest of the team. "Bad ones."

Heidar translated for Tanet, who nodded before transforming into his alter ego and bounding over the chain-link fence. A few flaps of his powerful wings took him up to the second story, and a heave and a wiggle forced his considerable bulk through a window. Unfortunately, he didn't bother to open it first.

So much for the element of surprise.

"What's he doing?" I asked.

Heidar gave me a sardonic look while breaking open the lock on the front gate. "Why do you think your father sent him with us?"

I preceded him through the fence and up a cracked concrete sidewalk. "To help?"

"He wants the rune, Claire. I saw it on his face when you were telling him about how we met. Your brother is here to get it for him."

I sighed. It didn't surprise me. The week I'd spent with my new relatives had been both very strange and eerily familiar. Strange because the family seemed genuinely happy to have me around, a sensation I'd never had growing up. Familiar because, despite the otherworldly surroundings, the plotting and scheming had been exactly the same as I'd heard every day as a child. This time it was Fey politics instead of human, but it gave me an identical queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Politics had led Father to try to sell me to the Fey, made the family declare me a murderer, and caused the Svarestri to try to kill me on sight. I hated politics.

"What would happen if the Dark Fey got the rune?" I asked, after Heidar kicked in the front door. The sound of splintering wood made me wince, but it made no sense to try to sneak around when we could hear the crashes a 1,200-pound dragon made as it tore through the place.