The Agency, Volume II Page 11

  “Oh, probably. If not in the locker room.”

  Sara saw one of the Admins approaching their table in something of a hurry, and sat back, lowering her fork. She recognized him: Steve, Ness’s assistant, dressed as always in his impeccable suit with his nose firmly planted in the air.

  When he reached them, though, he cleared his throat a bit nervously, and shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other as he said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt, but SA-5’s presence is urgently requested in the Director’s office.”

  Rowan met the Admin’s gaze, and Steve looked even more discomfited. “Did she say what it’s regarding?”

  “Something to do with the Elven refugee, sir. A message has been received from a delegation seeking custody of the child, and they refuse to speak with anyone but you directly.”

  “I see.” Rowan nodded, not seeming surprised. “I’ll be right there. Thank you.”

  Steve all but sprinted off, and Rowan chuckled. “What was that about?” Sara asked.

  “Oh, nothing—he has a crush on you, is all, and he thinks I’m terrifying. The usual.”

  “A crush on me? You’re joking, right? He doesn’t even know I’m female.”

  The Elf smiled sagely. “Trust me, I know these things. I should run—would you mind putting this up for me? I hate to miss the ice cream—I have tomorrow evening free, we could get wasted and have sex in your honor.”

  “Sounds like a party. As long as you keep me up to date on all the Elf-baby gossip.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He rose fluidly and left the room, and Sara reflected as she watched him walk away that her life, while certainly strange and getting stranger by the day, was really going pretty well these days.

  *****

  It had been years since Rowan had laid eyes upon one of his own kind, child or otherwise, and now in the space of three days he’d seen two: Elora, and now Sedna, the woman staring back at him over the video network.

  “Blessings upon you this day, elder,” Sedna said, bowing to the camera slightly. “I am Sedna of Clan Yew.”

  He returned the gesture and the greeting. “Rowan, Shadow Agent 5, Austin.”

  She looked mildly taken aback at his identification—no clan, no Elvish name—but didn’t comment. He noticed that her appearance was a more extreme version of his own; her hair was stark white with only a few strands of grey, and her eyes were a silvery blue that almost seemed white themselves.

  “Clan Yew,” he said. “I do not remember hearing of you before now.”

  “We are a refugee Clan,” she replied. “Yew is made up of the remnants of other Clans that have been destroyed in the last fifty years. We have among us former members of Birch.”

  “Excellent. I trust you’ve heard of our own little refugee.”

  “I have indeed. I would like to send a delegation to collect her.”

  Rowan couldn’t help but bristle a little at her choice of words, and at her tone, which touched on imperious and awoke his rebellious streak. “I would like to meet your delegation, to ascertain whether the situation is safe for Elora. I know nothing of your Clan’s location or membership, and if it’s unstable I won’t feel comfortable giving up custody of the child.”

  Now it was Sedna’s turn to bristle, but she was obviously a born diplomat, and held her tongue. “Very well. Shall we arrange a rendezvous point? I assume you are loath to give out the address of your secret military base.”

  “You assume correctly. Transmitting coordinates now.” He leaned forward and hit “send.” “Tomorrow evening at sunset at this location, you’ll be met by two Shadow Agents who will bring your delegation here to the base.”

  “As you wish.”

  The connection was severed, and Rowan looked over at Ness, who had stayed off to one side during the conversation. “A bit presumptuous, isn’t she?” the Director asked, leaning back in her chair thoughtfully.

  Rowan closed the conferencing window. “I suspect she was part of the governing council of whatever Clan she hails from. Do we have a location from the trace?”

  Ness looked at her own screen. “Somewhere near Santa Fe.”

  He frowned. “Well, she’s not from Santa Fe.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Wherever Clan Yew is living has a hard winter, with a lot of snow. I can tell by her hair. Which means she was calling from a dummy location, which means she doesn’t trust us. Which means I don’t trust her.”

  “Since when are Elves the scheming sort? I thought it was all white light and bunny rabbits with your folk.”

  Rowan made a face at her, and she chuckled. “We tend to be a bit more cautious now that most of us have been murdered. It may simply be that she wants to keep the whole thing secure and their location secret. Or she may have something to hide. I’ll know more when we meet in person. She’d have to have shields of steel to pull one over on a rethla.”

  “So she obviously didn’t know you personally—how did she know to call you ‘elder?’ She didn’t look any younger than you.”

  “Oh, she could tell. Just as I could tell she’s about a hundred and sixty. If she’s the spokeswoman I’d wager she’s one of the oldest of Clan Yew.”

  Ness regarded him seriously for a moment before saying, “You don’t like this.”

  “I don’t like feeling suspicious of my own people.”

  “You think they have ill intentions toward the girl?”

  “No. They wouldn’t hurt her; she’s a precious commodity. But they may have ill intentions toward the Agency. I’d like to request extra backup for this excursion—at least four Agents visible and another team covert.”

  “Done,” Ness agreed. “I’ll send SA-7 and 8 to be your immediate bodyguards. Jason has full Agency authority so if any decisions need to be made—“

  “—meaning if things go south and someone needs to be shot,” Rowan cut in.

  “—he can handle whatever they throw at us. If you decide that this is in any way a scam or an ambush, I authorize you to break off diplomatic relations or whatever you deem necessary.”

  “Thank you. I hope it won’t come to that. I hope I’m just being paranoid.”

  “Paranoia is part of the job,” Ness told him. “I’m proud of you, these last months—finally getting out of the base has been good for you. You’re thinking more and more like an Agent.”

  “Perhaps,” he replied, feeling suddenly tired and old from the sheer weight of memory. “But I’m becoming less and less like an Elf.”

  Part Six

  “Here we are,” Rowan said, holding the door open. “This is where you’ll be staying for the next few days.”

  Elora walked into the apartment, her long braid swinging behind her and her arms around her elephant, and surveyed the living room with interest. He knew she was seeing more than the physical—at her age she wouldn’t be terribly good at shielding, so she’d pick up psychic and emotional impressions the way a human child would pick up overheard curse words.

  “Does the night-walker live here with you?” she asked, looking back at him.

  He paused where he was settling her bag of meager belongings onto the couch. “No,” he answered. “He has his own quarters down below the ground.”

  Elora nodded. “Where the sun can’t reach,” she noted. “Did they let you bring the picture I was drawing?”

  “They did.” He fished the sketchpad out of the bag, along with a box of oil pastels—more adult than crayons, but still vibrantly colored. He handed both to her and she plopped down at the coffee table, propping her elephant up against the table leg setting up her miniature studio carefully with tiny hands.

  “That’s a lovely tree,” he said when she opened the sketchbook. “Is it one you remember from home?”

  “Yes. I used to climb in her branches. She called me her little squirrel.”

  Rowan lay a hand on her head, and she looked up at him, a moment of shared sorrow passing between them. It had been a long time since he’d been aroun
d someone who understood the depth and breadth of what he had lost.

  She returned to her drawing and he went into the kitchen to deposit the grocery sack of snacks and drinks the childcare people had sent along; he examined each item, approving, and called to her, “Would you like some juice?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He tried not to think about how weird he felt taking care of an Elfling, even for a few days; he was still sure this was the right place for her, but that didn’t make him parent material. Sara had been right—he was lucky there were no diapers involved.

  As he brought Elora her juice, the apartment door beeped, and the door swung inward, revealing Jason on the other side. He started to walk in, then saw the child on the floor and froze.

  “Oh, I forgot,” he said, momentarily flustered. “I can go, if…”

  Elora smiled up at him broadly. “Hello!” she sang around her juice glass. “I remember you! You rescued me, and you live underground.”

  The vampire blinked and didn’t seem to know how to respond to that, but Rowan gestured for him to come in, and he locked the door behind him.

  Jason sat gingerly on the couch a few feet from Elora, but she jumped up and went right over to him, climbing up into his lap for a hug.

  Rowan hid his laughter at the vampire’s stricken expression.

  Finally, Jason squeezed her round the middle, and satisfied, she went back to her work, humming quietly…and blessedly on key.

  “Don’t be scared,” Elora said reasonably. “I’m a lot smaller than you.”

  Something changed in his face, and he said, “True, but I heard that Elflings are poisonous.”

  She giggled. “Then you shouldn’t eat me. I’m Elora.”

  He laughed at that. “It’s nice to meet you, officially, miss Elora. You can call me Jason.”

  “You and Rowan are…” she frowned, looking for the right word in English, and turned her face up to the Elf. “Amori?” she asked.

  “Lovers,” he clarified.

  “Small word,” Elora said, pursing her lips. “Wrong word. This language stops too soon.”

  “Yes, it does.” To Jason’s puzzled look, he said, “There isn’t a direct analogue for amori in English. To us, ‘lovers’ is too small, too limited in its meaning.”

  “How many kinds of lovers are there in Elvish?” Jason asked.

  “About a dozen, plus some that overlap with ‘friend.’”

  “And what kind are amori?”

  Rowan started to try and find an answer that wouldn’t make Jason uneasy, but Elora spoke before he could come up with anything. “The kind that are always,” she explained. “The kind that are spirit and heart. The kind that wear bands, like my mother and father did.”

  The Elf cringed—there, she’d brought it up, now he was in for it.

  Jason raised an eyebrow. “Bands?”

  Elora either didn’t notice Rowan’s discomfort or didn’t care—given the smile it was probably the latter. He'd forgotten how devilishly clever the young ones could be. “Around here,” she said, touching her right wrist. “Silver means amorea. Mother had one with Father’s name, and he had one with hers. Sometimes they spent nights with other people, but they always came back, always.”

  Rowan cleared his throat. “The suffix is a gender. The ‘ea’ on the end indicates one male and one female, the ‘I’ is two male, an ‘a’ alone would be two female. For a trio you’d have a whole different set of endings.”

  Obviously the suffix wasn’t what was on Jason’s mind, but he nodded. “Oh.” He managed a wry smile. “Is there a word you use when two people love each other but have only been together for a few months and really haven’t quite reached that whole jewelry stage yet?”

  “Yes,” Elora said, nodding at him very seriously. “Denial.”

  There was a knock at the door, and Rowan said, “Thank you god,” before he could stop himself.

  “I’ll get it!” Jason said hastily and sprang up.

  Beck was standing out in the hallway with a box wrapped in sparkling glitter paper. “I came to see the little critter,” she announced and pushed past her twin. “You look like someone hit you in the head with a brick, bubba—everything okay?”

  “Elora was just educating us on Elven customs and terrifying us beyond all rational sense,” Rowan informed the mop-headed vampire, whose hair was currently streaked both red and green in honor of the holiday season.

  Beck knelt in front of the Elfling, who was staring at her openly, and handed her the package she was carrying. “It’s a present for you.”

  Elora might not be human, but wrapping paper was a universal enticement for children, and she tore into the packaging with gusto, revealing two things: the first Harry Potter book, and a chessboard.

  “I like books,” Elora said, sniffing the pages with a smile. “Tiomi Rowan, can you teach me to read English later?”

  “Of course,” he said with a smile at the title: Uncle. He caught Beck’s eye and added, “I can teach her telepathically in a matter of minutes, don’t worry.”

  “Cool.” Beck pulled the chessboard out and said to the child, “This is a game—I’ll teach you how to play. I figured Candyland might be a little young for you.”

  Elora was grinning again, and hopped up to give Beck an enthusiastic hug around the neck. “Thank you.”

  Beck hugged her back, and the two got down to the business of opening up the chessboard and arranging the pieces, while Beck started to explain the different sorts of moves.

  Jason rose from the couch and came to stand by Rowan at the bar. “I could use a drink. A big drink.”

  Rowan nodded and poured them both a whiskey. “Are you freaking out about what she said?”

  Jason swallowed his entire glass and shook his head. “Not at all. You?”

  “No, of course not. Okay, maybe a little.”

  The vampire looked relieved. “Isn’t goading us into marriage supposed to be a mother’s job, not a two-year-old’s?”

  “Well, it’s not marriage, really, we don’t have…um, right. Just remember, she’s smart but she’s still a child. The world is a lot simpler to her.” He looked his lover directly in the eye and said, “Just to be clear, I don’t expect any sort of commitment from you, ever. I’m perfectly happy with how things are.”

  “Good. Me too. Now, Ness tells me we may have a home for the little Yenta?”

  “We may. We’ve got a briefing on the rendezvous at five tomorrow in Conference One.”

  “You’re expecting trouble.”

  “I’m expecting drama. Whether that translates to something worse, we’ll see. I’d rather be prepared than caught off guard.”

  “What makes you so suspicious? They’re Elves, aren’t they? They may be a ragtag Clan, but they’re still a Clan.”

  “Maybe. But I still don’t like it. I won’t like it until I meet them face to face.”

  "Why not?"

  Rowan looked away, out into the living room where Elora and Beck were starting their first match, the child's bare feet swaying back and forth as she hummed, one hand grasping her stuffed elephant and the other sliding a pawn forward two spaces.

  He took a long drink off his whiskey and said, softly, "Yew trees are poisonous."

  *****

  Mayfield Park and Preserve was one of Rowan's favorite places in Austin. He'd been perhaps three times, once back before he had the inhibitor, but there were usually few enough people wandering through the garden and nature trails that he had been able to withstand the mental pressure with only a migraine to show for it later. Since then he'd been twice with Sara on days when they were actually out with the sun. Once, they'd accidentally crashed a wedding being held on the grounds and been treated to champagne and cake by cheerful revelers.

  The former owners' house and gardens were situated at the front of the land, with the preserve spreading out behind it to the lake. There were peacocks roaming the garden, sometimes perched majestically in a low-branched tr
ee, their eerie wailing cries piercing the air and scaring the hell out of passersby.

  The park closed at sunset and was close to the base, making it an ideal spot for the rendezvous. Rowan climbed out of the Agency van with Beck, Jason, and two other Agents in tow; the rest were already here, covering vantage points around the garden where the meeting would take place.

  Rowan had chosen to dress in uniform like the others instead of wearing something more typical of his race—he wanted it clear where his loyalties lay. He also wore the inhibitor…and his gun. He wasn't armed to the teeth like the twins were, but he was wary.