All the way here, his stomach had been telling him this was a mistake, but he'd come too far to back out now.
Maybe he wouldn't talk to them, though—at least not as himself. A little Bardic glamourie would be enough to ensure that they didn't recognize him—and it wasn't as if they were expecting to see him, after all. Like Hosea said, they thought he was dead.
Maybe just seeing them would be enough. Right now Eric was sure it would be more than enough. No matter how many times he told himself that they were nothing more than human beings—misguided human beings, to be sure—with absolutely no power over him, he was unable to shake the conviction that he was walking into a trap. That the moment he crossed the threshold of his old home, he'd find himself ensnared in the web of his childhood again, at the mercy of people that his subconscious insisted were monsters.
Well, that's what this little pleasure trip is all about, isn't it? To prove that none of that is true.
He found his old neighborhood without trouble. His parents had lived for as long as he could remember on the same spacious tree-lined street within walking distance of Harvard University. Everything had a refined and mannered elegance that set his teeth on edge; a self-satisfaction that bordered on smugness. It took a great deal of money to live comfortably in Cambridge, but it was the height of bad form to flaunt it in any way. These were houses—very large houses, of course, but certainly not mansions. They were set close together, and close to the street; Boston was a very old city, and its architecture reflected the fact. Volvo station wagons and the occasional chaste BMW were parked in the driveways and along the streets; nothing vulgar and flashy for the inhabitants of the People's Republic of Cambridge. Lady Day (not that she was vulgar or flashy!) stood out like a frog on a birthday cake.
Good, Eric thought with savage satisfaction.
The house looked just as he remembered it. There were two cars in the driveway; both unfamiliar, but that was only to be expected. He'd been gone for twenty years, after all. But maybe his parents weren't living here any more?
He supposed he'd better check.
He wheeled Lady Day in behind the second car parked in the driveway—there was just enough room to get her off the street—and swung off, pulling off his helmet and hooking it over the back. He patted her absently on the gas tank. "Be good," he told the elvensteed.
She flashed her lights in silent reply.
It was a little after two when he went up the steps and onto the porch, and only stubbornness kept him moving forward. For a moment he hoped he could give up, turn back—he could always try over at the university, after all; it was probably what he should have done in the first place—but no, the brass plate over the mailbox still said "Banyon."
He was in the right place after all.
He was about to leave anyway—going over to the university really was a better idea—when the front door opened, and Eric found himself staring at his mother.
She's old! was his first automatic shocked thought.
Fiona Sommerville Banyon stared at him without recognition, raising one well-manicured auburn eyebrow. She wore a cashmere twinset, tweed skirt, and pearls, his mother's uniform for as long as Eric could remember. Her chestnut hair was shoulder-length, carefully colored to mask any trace of grey.
"Thank you for coming," she said, opening the door wider and stepping back. "We're glad you could make it so quickly."
Feeling a growing sense of unreality, Eric opened the storm door and stepped inside. How could she have been expecting him? He hadn't known he'd be coming himself until yesterday.
Was this a trap? A trick? A spell?
Feeling tense and off-balance, Eric followed her inside, into the company parlor on the right. The music parlor was on the left; with an effort he kept himself from looking to see if the piano and the concert harp were still there.
They'd redecorated since he'd left. Some of the pieces, like Grandmother's antique sideboard and the long-case clock, were still there, though in different places than he remembered, but the couch and chairs were new.
And his father was there. Eric took a deep breath, willing his face to remain expressionless. He'd faced down Aerune mac Audelaine Lord of Death and Pain, and worse. He was not going to run from a college professor!
There was grey in Michael Banyon's hair now; distinguished silver wings at the temples, and Eric just bet that all the girls in his History of Music Arts classes just swooned over it. He advanced toward Eric, hand out.
They must think I'm someone else. I have got to tell them who I am!
But Michael Banyon didn't give him the chance.
"We're very grateful you were able to come on such short notice, Mr. Dorland. Our son is very important to us, and believe me, we will do anything to get him back."
He took Eric's hand and shook it firmly, in his strong musician's grip.
Now? Eric thought, stunned to silence. They're looking for me now? That made no sense at all. It had been twenty years, World time. And when he'd come back to live in the World Above, he'd covered his tracks very carefully—and Ria was doing a lot more to help. Certainly he was attending Juilliard as Eric Banyon, but it was a common enough name. And if his parents should have happened to hear about it, and connect that Eric Banyon with their vanished son, they wouldn't have needed to hire a private detective to find him. They'd just have gotten in a car and driven down.
"Would you like to see Magnus' room?" his mother said.
Magnus?
Suddenly Eric really did seriously wonder if he were under a spell, or if he'd fallen into a parallel universe. Or if this could somehow be the wrong house, despite the fact that he'd come to the right address, and these were his parents, twenty years older, and the name "Banyon" was still on the front door.
"Yes. Thank you." He managed to find his voice at last.
"You go ahead, Fi," his father said, sitting down on the couch. As usual, once he'd done the meet-and-greet, Michael Banyon thought his duties were discharged, Eric thought irritably. He followed Fiona Banyon up the stairs, to . . . his . . . old room.
But not his any longer. It, like the parlor, had been completely redecorated, and now bore a certain family resemblance (though without the black walls) to Kayla's apartment. It was obviously the room of a teenaged boy.
"We left it just the way it was when he . . . left," Mrs. Banyon said. "I don't know how many times I told him to take down those posters. Rock music! It's just noise. Not real music."
Eric looked around. He felt more comfortable here. At least this place looked completely different than everything he was used to.
"Why don't you tell me everything?" he said.
"But I told you—over the phone—"
"I'd like to hear it again," Eric said gently. "Sometimes the smallest details can be important." Such as what his parents were doing with a teenaged boy they were calling their son.
Fiona walked into the room and sat down. The bed had been made to Marine Corps standards.
"About a month ago—let me see, that would be, September 8th—I came home and Magnus wasn't here. He was supposed to come straight home from school; we'd grounded him because his psychologist said he'd respond well to limits. I asked Connie—she was our cook-housekeeper at the time—where he was, and she said she hadn't seen him at all that day. Naturally I fired her.
"We called the police. Michael even tried checking his computer, but he'd, oh, formatted the hard disk or something, and we couldn't get it to work. We went to the police and filled out all the papers, and they . . . well, frankly, I was very disappointed. We were devastated, of course."
She didn't sound devastated, Eric thought cynically. She sounded more annoyed than anything else. Of course, his parents weren't big on emotional displays, but he would have thought a missing child would be worth something. A few tears at least, or some evidence of sleepless nights?
"Mr. Dorland, I am terribly worried about my child. Magnus is . . . special. He's a gifted and talented musician. Both Michael and I have a certain amount of musical ability, but Magnus is a musical prodigy. He's been giving performances since he was four. But as you know, geniuses have certain . . . emotional problems, and lately he'd become rather, well, moody and rebellious. It was bad enough when he started listening to this rock music, but then he developed this obsession about actually performing it, and that, of course, we couldn't allow. Magnus is a pianist. He can't possibly be allowed to debase his gifts.
"Of course he receives counseling, and naturally he attends one of the best private schools in Boston."
"St. Augustine," Eric said. Of course it would be St. Augustine.
Her eyes widened in surprise. "You know it?"
"It's my business to know things, Mrs. Banyon," Eric said, covering his slip smoothly. He remembered St. Augustine, and not fondly: he'd gone there until he'd switched to Juilliard, and it had been several years of unmitigated hell.
"I've written a very stiff note to the headmaster there! What's the point of a private school if not to protect its students from unhealthy influences? But obviously Magnus fell in with a bad crowd there, because he's always been such a good little boy. . . ."
"And your son was how old, exactly?" Eric asked, sending out a thread of Bardic Magic to keep her from finding the question odd, to encourage her to tell him everything she knew, freely and without constraint. Whoever Dorland was, he obviously already knew the answers, and Eric wanted to know them too.
"He just turned seventeen in July," Mrs. Banyon said. "We'd wanted to send him to Juilliard, but he really needed more structure. Michael was thinking of a good boarding school, but . . . the music."
The music. It was always the music, wasn't it? You didn't think you could trust this kid in the big city, and if you locked him up somewhere, he wouldn't be around to feed your ego, would he? Eric took a deep breath, forcing his emotions down, away from the surface. He couldn't afford to show them. And he'd abandoned all idea of letting them know who he really was. Not now.
"Find him, Mr. Dorland. Bring him back. We'll put an end to this rock music nonsense. Magnus will study classical music, just like. . . ." She faltered to a stop, looking confused.
"Just like who, Mrs. Banyon?" Eric asked softly, strengthening the thread of magic in his words. "Do you have any other children? Any other family? Someone he might go to?"
"Oh no," Mrs. Banyon assured him, her eyes clear and untroubled. "Magnus did have an older brother once. But Eric died before Magnus was born."
She got to her feet, looking around the room with distaste. "I suppose you'd like to stay here for a while and look around. I'll be downstairs if you need me for anything."
She walked out, leaving Eric alone.
Eric crossed the room and sat down at the desk, willing himself to be calm. He took several deep breaths, forcing serenity on himself as if he wrestled with a living enemy.
It was bad enough that he'd come here at all. That had been a stupid idea. But he knew now, it had been a bad choice made for a good reason, because if he hadn't done it, he would never have known that Magnus Banyon existed.
His brother.
I have a brother.
Not only was that unbelievable, it wasn't the worst part.
If my brother is seventeen—and add nine months gestation to that—then about how long was I gone for when they decided to wash their hands of me and start over?
Not long enough.
His parents had obviously learned nothing from ruining his life, and had in fact repeated their mistake line for line—another trophy child, another "prodigy." The only plus was that this time apparently they hadn't driven their son crazy, if reading between the lines was any clue. This son was no docile victim. He was a fighter, a discipline problem, a candidate for one of those boarding schools where the rich sent their children so they could be someone else's problem, safely out of sight, and controlled and confined so that any "unsuitable" tendencies could be eviscerated out of them.
And Magnus, who undoubtedly knew that, had run away before that could happen. And his parents had waited an entire month before bothering to apply their own resources to the hunt for him. Anything could have happened to him by now.
If anyone ever deserved full and proper punishment for their acts, it was Michael and Fiona Banyon. And Eric had the power to provide it in the last full measure. With a word, with a gesture . . .
Wait! Stop it! What are you thinking?
Eric forced himself to stop. Just . . . stop. He stepped back from his anger as Master Dharniel had taught him, as Eric was teaching Hosea, withdrawing himself from it until he stood outside it, until he could push it away from himself and set it aside. If there is a proper day for this, then that day will come. But that day is not today.
He could not think about this now. And he didn't really have the time. If the real Dorland showed up while he was here, there would be explanations to make that Eric didn't have the energy or control for just now. The barriers he had just erected were fragile. He dared not test them.
And his mother was right about one thing. Magnus had to be found—and he had to be the one to do it.
Before they did. The elves that were his friends, mentors, and role models made it part of their life's work—and they had very long lives—to rescue abused children from their abusers. If Eric's own life was anything to go by, the Banyons, Fiona and Michael, certainly fit that description. The fact that Magnus was his own blood, his own brother, just made it that much more important that he be rescued.
And—hidden?
Bet your sweet ass.
He got to his feet and quickly searched the room. There wasn't much in the way of personal items—no letters or diaries—and when he turned on the computer, he found that it had, indeed, been wiped, and there were no backup disks or copies of personal files anywhere. Clever Magnus! he found himself thinking in approval. Smarter than I ever was at your age . . .
Tucked in the back of a sock drawer he found a bus pass with a picture on it, and for the first time got a look at his brother.
The same auburn hair—they both got that from their mother. Worn long—to make him look like a Baby Mozart, Eric guessed sourly. Green eyes, at least the bus pass said so. Girlishly pretty—Eric winced in sympathy, remembering the fights he'd had to get into as a kid because of his own looks—but the mouth was set in a permanent smirk that indicated this kid was nothing but trouble. Good for you, kid.
Eric tucked the bus pass in his pocket and kept looking.
In another drawer, he found a hairbrush, with several strands of long auburn hair tangled among the bristles. Carefully, Eric teased several of them free, winding them around his finger, and tucked them into his wallet. With those, and a little magic, he'd be able to find Magnus quickly and easily.
If he was still alive.
Eric winced, fighting down fear.
A month on the streets alone. Not everybody was as smart and lucky as Kayla had been. As he had been, face it. Kids died on the streets, every day.
If that had happened . . .
Don't borrow trouble, Eric told himself firmly.
He went down the stairs, schooling his face to blankness.
"I think I have everything I need here," he said, as the elder Banyons rose to their feet. "I'll be in touch." When Hell freezes rock-solid.
They walked him to the door. As he went down the steps, hearing the door close behind him, he realized there was one last thing he needed to do here.
Cover his tracks. It wouldn't do for them to tell Dorland he'd already been here when the man finally arrived, after all.
He turned back to the house, reaching out for his magic, feeling the music well up in him. He sighed a little with relief to have it come so easily, but the control he'd learned Underhill held firm after all, even rattled as he was. The song spilled through him, into the world; Eric pursed his lips and whistled a few notes of an old country air.
Forget. Forget I was ever here. Forget you spoke to me. Forget . . . forget . . . forget . . .
It was done. His parents wouldn't remember he'd been here, or that they'd spoken to him, or that they'd mistaken him for their Mr. Dorland. He swung his leg over Lady Day and backed out of the driveway, heading sedately down the street just as a sleek grey Mercedes with smoked windows pulled up in front of the Banyon house.
He didn't go far. Finding Magnus was the highest priority, and it couldn't wait. He headed over to Harvard, where there was a lot of open space where he could work undisturbed. Parking Lady Day and commanding her to make herself inconspicuous, Eric walked until he could put his back against a tree.
The weather was freezing, the wind promising more early snow. Eric saw very few people, and those he did see were bundled up and hurrying on their way to be elsewhere.
Fortunately, the campus was fairly deserted at this time of year. Thanksgiving break, everyone heading home to their families, all of the schools closed, only a few students left on campus.
He was starting here on the chance that Magnus was still somewhere in the Boston area. Eric couldn't afford to ignore any possibility. How far the boy had run depended on how much money he'd had, how lucky he'd been at hitching rides, and whether he had any friends in the area who would have taken him in and hidden him.
Eric reached into his wallet and took out the lock of hair, coiling it around his finger again. The old magics, the simple magics, were the strongest. According to the Doctrine of Contagion, objects that were once linked were linked forever, so a lock of hair, even though no longer physically attached to a person, was still a part of them.
Summoning up his flute of air, Eric closed his eyes and began to play, concentrating on the strands of hair wound around his finger. Show me where you are. Alive or dead, show me where you are at this moment.
Wistful songs, yearning songs—"She Moved Through The Fair," and "Greensleeves," and "Hame, Hame, Hame." On and on he played, searching outward, mile after mile.
At last, exhausted, he had to stop.
He'd found nothing.
Eric felt a combination of frustration and relief. Magnus wasn't here. Not in Boston, not anywhere near it. Neither alive nor dead.
That was something, anyway. He wasn't sure what, but something.
By the time Eric got back to New York again, he'd had far too much time to do nothing but think, and he was furious all over again. It wasn't enough that his parents had ruined his life. No, they'd thrown him away like a used paper cup—without even a decent period of mourning—and gotten themselves another child to ruin. And that hurt, actually—
It hurt more than he had expected it to. He'd always known he was just a trophy, a possession to them, but he had never thought of himself as disposable.
He'd always assumed they'd searched for him when he disappeared. Now he wondered if they ever had. He'd been eighteen, after all. A legal adult. Pretty hard to drag back and make jump through hoops again.
Not like Magnus.
He was shaking so hard he could barely hold on to the handlebars of the bike. Fortunately Lady Day could do all the driving, but he could feel the elvensteed's worry. He tried to send her reassuring thoughts, but he was so angry he could hardly think straight.
Get it together, Banyon. Before you do something really stupid.
Lady Day pulled up in the little parking lot behind Guardian House and stopped. It was already dark. Eric got off stiffly and checked his watch. Six o'clock.
He needed to talk to someone about this before he blew a gasket. Hosea would be a good place to start.
But when he went inside and tapped on Hosea's door, there was no answer. Must be out, Eric thought, feeling oddly disappointed.
Kayla? He rejected the idea. What he was feeling right now would probably fry the young Healer in her tracks, and besides, she was too young for this.
Toni? Paul? José? Eric considered and rejected the idea. The other Guardians were friends, but, well, this was something too personal to discuss with them.
He went up to his own apartment and looked at the phone.
Was this something he needed to call Oriana about?
Eric thought the matter over carefully. Was his reluctance to call her reasonable, or was he hiding out because he'd done something really stupid and didn't want to get zinged for it? Probably a little of both, he decided. I'll sleep on it, and I'll call her tomorrow during office hours and see if she thinks I need to come in before next Monday.
Knowing she probably would.
How could something he hadn't known about this morning—that had been going along for years without him knowing about it—hurt so damned much? And he knew he had to get himself straightened out about it fast, because Magnus' problems wouldn't wait.
But there was someone here he could talk to now.
"Greystone?" he said aloud. "You want to come down?"
He went into the kitchen to put up the water for tea.
When he came back into the living room, Greystone had just finished climbing in through the window.
"Hola, boyo," the gargoyle said. "And how was Beantown?"
"I've got a baby brother," Eric said, torn between laughter and tears. He threw himself down on the couch. It all seemed utterly ridiculous when he said it aloud.
"It must have been some family reunion," Greystone said, easing himself into a chair. The leather creaked and groaned under the gargoyle's weight, but it held. It was Greystone's favorite chair. "Do you want to tell me all the gory details?"
"Not much of a family reunion," Eric said. "He's run away from home. A month ago. I guess it's a family tradition. His name's Magnus."
" 'Magnus Banyon.' Now there's a name to resonate through the halls of history," Greystone commented dryly. "And where is the little lad now?"
"I don't know!" Eric shouted, lunging to his feet again. "I don't know if he's alive, or— I looked all over Boston for him. He's not there. He's seventeen. They must have . . . they had him studying music, too. At St. Augustine. Another little prodigy," he said in disgust.
He began to pace back and forth, too worked up to sit still. "I went to see my parents. They thought I was this private detective they've hired, so they told me all about it. They left me alone in his room long enough for me to pick up some things to set the spell to find him with, but . . . that really isn't my kind of magic. I could have made a mistake. He could be there, somewhere. I might have missed him. He's been on the streets for a month. Anything could have happened to him. He's only seventeen—a baby!"
"Not so very much younger than you were when you hit the streets, laddybuck. You survived," Greystone reminded him quietly.
"Yes— And— But—" Eric sputtered. But when I think of all the things I did in order to survive, and how I almost didn't survive . . .
"And yon bairn has allies and friends, even if he doesn't know it yet," Greystone went on reasonably. "Powerful allies and powerful friends. So why don't you just go pick up that phone and call one of them? And by the by, your tea kettle's boiling."
It was a little after seven p.m., but Ria Llewellyn had no plans to leave for hours yet. There was work to do. There was always work to do. Glancing up from the top of her antique rosewood desk, she could look out through the glass walls of her office at the lights of the other buildings along the avenue where other New Yorkers were staying equally late. New York, as the saying went, is the City that Works.
And that suited Ria just fine.
The construction on the five floors of LlewellCo offices had finally been finished late last fall, including installing the new carpet for her penthouse suite—cream, with the red dragon of her corporate logo woven into the center. This spring, she'd finally finished the paperwork involved in shifting her power base to the East Coast, and turned LlewellCo West over to Jonathan as his own private sub-fief, a reward for many years of good and faithful service.
She'd gotten tired of fighting with the co-op board of her Park Avenue apartment and bought another one on Central Park South, buying the building first to make sure she wouldn't have any further trouble with the tenants' committee. The view of the Park was breathtaking; well worth the trouble of moving and redecorating, in Ria's opinion.
She guessed it was time to give up and admit she was just a New York City kind of girl. She'd been all over the world, spent a lot of time in most of the "great" cities, and never found one that fit her so well emotionally. And if that meant, as Eric often teased, that she was a clothes-obsessed workaholic, so be it. Somebody had to see that the work got done.
And there was always more work.
If—finally, slowly—LlewellCo was starting to take on the shape she envisioned for it, and not the shape that Perenor had given it, then that hardly meant her work was finished. Each problem solved only seemed to mean that two or three more sprang up. Dragon's teeth.
The Threshold disaster, for example. They were most of the way out from under the immediate consequences—though they'd still be battling cleanup on that one for years to come—but there was still the question of who all of Robert Lintel's clients had been. They had to be tracked down, each and every one of them, and nailed to the nearest barn door—if she had to build the barn herself.
And she couldn't think about Threshold without thinking about Aerune mac Audelaine. Aerune himself was dealt with, trapped in a magical labyrinth that Eric had gotten from a dragon named Chinthliss, so he was no longer a threat. But Aerune had been partners with a man named Parker Wheatley, who had ties to the government, and Wheatley remained a threat. Because Wheatley not only believed in elves, but thought (thanks to Aerune's manipulations) that they were out to destroy the human race. Wheatley had a little black budget operation called the Paranormal Defense Initiative that was out to get its hands on elves by any means possible, and—also thanks to Aerune—had its hands on a selection of techno toys that made that frighteningly possible.
They all—she, Eric, his Guardian friends—had been pretty sure that without Aerune's backing, Wheatley would just dry up and wither away, but that had been before the government had started making a major antiterrorism push. Now getting rid of Wheatley's Elven padrone might not be enough to get rid of the PDI.
And getting rid of a Washington insider wasn't something Eric could do, nor his little friends with their swords and spells, as much fun as they might be to spend a weekend Underhill with. This was something only Ria could do, and it was something that required delicate manipulation, and more than a little string-pulling in the political arena.
But thinking about that "weekend Underhill"—though it hadn't exactly been a weekend—turned her thoughts, as they so often turned when she was tired, to the peculiar ordeal the seven of them had shared when they had entered Aerune's mind: of actually experiencing what it had been like to live in a world millennia dead, when Sidhe had lived openly among humans as their guardians and caretakers.
Ria frowned. Fascinating and uncomfortable as it had been, it had raised more questions than it had answered.
Just what exactly was the relationship between Sidhe and humanity? Where and when did it start, and what was it for? Was it a good thing, or a bad thing, and should it be allowed to continue?
The phone rang.
Ria glanced at her phone. Anita was gone for the evening, and the switchboard routed everything to voicemail after 5:00, but the light that was flashing was for her private line. Very few people had that number.
She picked up the phone.
"Llewellyn."
"It's Eric."
He didn't sound as if he'd had a good day at all, and Eric's bad days tended to be bad for more people than just Eric. "What's wrong?" she asked sharply.
"Can I come over?" he asked, and that wasn't like Eric either. He teased, he fenced, he played with words; she shouldn't have gotten off without at least one gibe about him finding her here so late.
"Yes. I'll be here. I'll call down and make sure Security is expecting you."
The phone went dead in her ear. He'd hung up.
This must be something truly bad. And she couldn't think of anything that he wouldn't at least try to prepare her for over the phone. Not Hosea. I don't think I could stand it if anybody else died right now. Or Kayla—
No. If something was wrong with Kayla, he'd have told her immediately. Or if Kayla was dead, and there was nothing to be done, he'd have come immediately and called her from downstairs.
But he'd sounded so rattled, so lost. . . .
At least she knew it wasn't family problems. Eric didn't have any family, if you didn't count the Misthold elves and Kentraine, and all of them were locked up safe Underhill. Baby Maeve even had her own personal bodyguard. If there was one set of people Eric didn't have to worry about, it was his family.
Ria stood it as long as she could, then gave up and began to pace. She had a fine large executive office—about the size of Eric's entire apartment—with plenty of room for pacing.
If she was worried about Eric, it was only because he was a friend.
She was not in love with Eric Banyon, she told herself firmly and not for the first time. Love was a very bad idea for their kind. It always ended badly. It made you want more than it was good for you to have. Loved him, that she'd admit to freely. Eric was a loveable man, and there'd been a bond between them from the first moment they'd met as adversaries, she as Perenor's pawn and he as the Sun-Descending Sidhe's last hope. That tie, strange and ill-starred as it was, had only strengthened through the years. She knew he felt it as much as she did.
Lovers, yes. Friends, always, or so she hoped.
But in love with him? No. Never. That would be madness.
Eric wouldn't know what to do with a real love affair—and, Ria suspected, neither would she.
Eric, what's wrong? If the world's hurt you, I— I'll tear it down around us both, I swear!
About twenty minutes after the call, there was a knock on the door. Ria opened it. Eric was standing there, next to one of the LlewellCo security guards.
"Thanks, George," he said, with the ghost of a grin. "I think I can find my way from here."
"You have a good evening, Mr. Banyon. Be sure to call when you're ready to come down."
"I'll remind him," Ria said. The guard touched his cap, and walked off.
Eric looked at her questioningly.
"New security measures," Ria said.
"You should just buy the building," Eric said. "Then you wouldn't be bothered."
"As a matter of fact, I do own the building; real estate is always a good investment. These are my security measures," Ria said with a little smile. "If you don't work here—and can't show an ID even if you do work here—you don't get above the lobby without an escort, no matter what time of day it is."
"Welcome to New York," Eric said with a sigh. He looked around the office as if he'd forgotten why he'd come.
There were deep shadows under his eyes, and an unfamiliar set to his mouth. No, Ria decided with an odd pang of recognition. A familiar one, but one she hadn't seen in years: it was that look of sullen anger the old Eric had worn, that look of always being on the verge of lashing out at something.
Eric walked over to the window and stood looking out, staring down into the city streets below. Chains of head- and taillights moved through the streets below like rivers of sluggish jewels.
"Tea? Coffee? Well, actually, I can't offer you either one now that Anita's gone home, but I'm sure there's something around here. But you didn't come over for a drink," Ria said.
Eric leaned against the glass, his back to her. She watched him force himself to relax, saw the effort it took.
"You know I've been seeing Dr. Dunaway for almost a year now, getting some stuff straightened out. It's been pretty useful. You know, you might think about trying it," he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him.
Ria laughed. She couldn't help it. "Eric, my dear, any daughter of Perenor's got over the need to talk to strangers a long time ago. And I'm sure that inviting me to seek psychiatric help is not what this is about."
"No." She watched as he took a deep breath, forcing himself to come to the point. "I came because I need help . . . to keep from killing somebody."
His voice was as tight as Hosea's banjo strings, and the over- and under-tones so complicated that even she couldn't make head or tail of them, other than for the fury in it. Anger was too tame a word, and fury, too, wasn't the right word for what she heard in him tonight. Call it rage. Carefully controlled rage, that was on the edge of slipping that careful control.
"Well," Ria walked over to her desk and sat on the edge, watching his back intently, "most people would say the opposite sort of help was more in my line."
"I don't . . . I can't keep from hating them. I'm trying, but . . . I can't," Eric said raggedly.
Ria walked over to him and put an arm around him, feeling the tension of the muscles beneath the jacket, and led him firmly over to the couch, forcing him to sit down. His face looked white and strained. "Make sense," she commanded. "Now. Or I am going to phone your very competent headshrinker and sit on you myself until she gets here." She sat down beside him and took both his hands. They were colder than the November weather outside could account for.
"I've got a little brother." Eric's voice was forlorn.
She'd been prepared to hear horrors—tales of death, dismemberment, terminal illness, coming apocalypse. Eric's simple statement caught Ria completely off-balance. She whooped with startled laughter.
"It isn't funny!" Eric snarled, but then the sense of his own words seemed to penetrate, and his mouth quirked up in a rueful grin, setting Ria off again.
She did her best to stop laughing, but it was hard.
"Yes," she said, as gravely as she could manage, "I can certainly see that a baby brother is a great catastrophe." She took a deep breath, sobering further. "Are you sure? How do you know?"
"I'm sure. I went to see my parents today."
That drove the last of the laughter from Ria's emotions. Of all of Eric's close circle of friends, she was the one who knew the most about his childhood, and that only because she'd stolen the memories from his mind years before while she'd had him trapped and besotted in one of Perenor's pocket domains.
"Why?" she asked bluntly.
"I realized they still had too much power in my life. I'd never let go of the past, not really, just walled it up and pretended it wasn't there. I thought confronting them might help. It was probably a stupid idea."
"Reckless at least," Ria said calmly. "Did they recognize you?"
"They thought I was the private detective they'd hired to find their son. Their other son. Their seventeen-year-old piano prodigy son Magnus, who ran away from home last month."
Ria could do the math as well as Eric could. Her eyelids flickered. Aloud she said only, "They took their sweet time hiring a specialist. Who?"
"Someone named Dorland." Eric's voice was flat, colorless beneath his iron control.
"I'll get on it, find out what I can about him. And do they remember you were there?"
"No," Eric said, his voice even. "I took care of it."
"That's my Bard," Ria said, kissing him gently on the forehead. "Now, where's Magnus?"
"I looked in Boston," Eric answered. "He wasn't there. Ria, how could they—"
"Because they're morons," Ria said matter-of-factly, cutting through Eric's rekindling anger with simple pragmatism. "Blind, stupid, selfish, ignorant morons, who have never taken a moment in their entire lives to think about anything but themselves and what they want. They aren't worth another minute of your time, now or ever. Eric, my—" she stopped herself before she could say the forbidden word, "—my friend, if they considered you disposable, how much more right have you got to think the same of them? Dispose of them; wad them up and throw them away. They're trash; they aren't worth a moment of heartache. But Magnus is. A runaway teenager—especially one as stubborn as a brother of yours is likely to be—oh yes, and don't forget one who's also likely to have the Bardic Gift, or at least leanings in that direction, since it runs in bloodlines—could be getting into all kinds of trouble out there, wherever he is. We should find him. Now."
Eric took a deep breath, accepting the truth of her words. "Okay. We find him."
"What have you tried so far?" Ria asked.
"A Finding spell, up in Boston." Eric dug around in his pockets. "Here's a picture of him. And here's a lock of his hair. He wasn't there, either dead or alive. But I was only able to search the immediate area."
Ria took the small card Eric handed her and studied the picture, then examined the lock of hair. "Cute kid. Plenty to go on here. Let me get what I need, and we'll try another kind of spell."
Ria walked out of the office, leaving Eric sitting on the couch, and went looking for what she needed. She came back a few minutes later with a shallow metal dish full of water, which she placed carefully on the large round glass-topped table in front of the couch.
"I am not getting water spots all over my leather-topped desk," she said firmly, noting Eric's quizzical glance.
"What are you doing?" Eric asked curiously. Bardic magic was one thing, and Elven magic tended to be constructs of pure energy, but Ria, being half-human, tended to rely sometimes on things that owed nothing to the Elven magic that Eric was familiar with. In fact, Ria had told him once that she was a sorceress, not any kind of a Sidhe Magus at all. . . .
"Scrying. Your brother's image should appear in this bowl of water, no matter where on Earth he is—and if he's been taken Underhill, we should at least get a hint of that from whatever images appear. The hard part will be seeing enough of the background to be able to pinpoint his location, but once I've got him, I should be able to move the image and look around a little. . . ."
She selected a single strand of hair out of the coil and floated it on top of the water, then breathed across the surface.
The water in the bowl went milky, then faded until it was as if they were staring down into a pool of mercury, though, oddly, the silvery surface reflected neither of their faces.
"What's it doing?" Eric whispered, unconsciously keeping his voice low.
"It's working," Ria said shortly. "Quiet."
Shapes appeared in the mirrored surface, familiar yet distorted, breaking apart and reforming almost too fast to be recognized. Eric caught the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Grand Central Station, the New York Public Library, the lobby of the Empire State Building. . . .
"New York," he said.
"He's here—and alive," Ria said. "Where is he? Show me!" she demanded of the magic.
The mercury darkened now to true black, with moving flecks of light that Eric guessed must be the lights of passing cars, or maybe streetlights. But it still kept up its frantic dance of images, moving from scene to scene too fast for either of the watchers to quite identify any of them.
Finally Ria gave up, passing her hand across the surface of the bowl. The liquid within faded to water once more.
"He's in Manhattan," Ria said.
"He's alive," Eric said, with relief. This morning, he hadn't known he had a brother. Tonight, he was weak with thankfulness that his brother was still alive. And he hadn't even had a chance to meet the boy yet!
Ria frowned down at the scrying bowl as though it were a personal enemy. "It should have worked better than that," she said.
"Bardic blood?" Eric suggested. It was the only thing he could think of.
"Shall we test the theory?" Ria said. "Give me a strand of your hair."
Eric wore his hair short these days, but he managed to yank a few strands loose. Ria coiled up the strand of Magnus' hair and returned it to Eric, then floated the short strands of Eric's hair on the surface of the bowl and repeated the spell. The water quickly darkened to silver and showed them Ria's office, with Eric sitting on the couch beside Ria.
"Not that, then," Eric said, puzzled.
"But something's interfering with the magic," Ria said. "Now what?"
"I guess I go after him the good old-fashioned way," Eric said. "He's a runaway, and I know he's in Manhattan. There aren't that many places he can be."
Ria made a face eloquent in its disbelief. "Why don't you ask Hosea about that sometime?" was all she said. "Eric, do you want some help? There are people who specialize in this sort of thing, you know. I can hire the best. They'll have contacts, experience. . . ."
Eric hesitated. Was he being stupid, wanting to do this by himself? But all his instincts said no.
"Just give me a few days. I'm not going to turn this into any kind of crusade. If I do need help, I'll ask for it. I'm not going to play games, Ria. Not with my . . . brother's . . . life. But . . . I feel almost like I already know him. And I do know his parents. He'll be expecting detectives. I did. And if he does have a trace of Bardic Gift—which might still be why your scrying spell didn't work—he'll recognize them through any disguise. If he gets frightened and runs again, to somewhere else, he could end up in even worse trouble than he's in now. I don't want to scare him, I just want to find him. But . . . what do I do then?" Eric smiled at her crookedly, and Ria reached out to ruffle his hair gently.
"Find him first. Keep him safe when you do find him. Sort out everything else after you've done those two things."
"I . . . thanks. You're a good friend."
"Well, don't let anyone hear you say that. You'll ruin my corporate shark image," Ria said lightly.
Eric got to his feet. "I guess I'd better be going. You're probably going to want to stay here and work all night."
"Somebody's got to," Ria said. She went over to the phone and punched a two-digit number. "George? Mr. Banyon's ready to come down now."
She set down the phone, and turned to give him a good once-over with her eyes. Maybe with more than her eyes. "Are you going to be all right tonight? Really all right?"
Eric smiled tiredly, not pretending to misunderstand what she meant. "Greystone's just waiting for me to get back. We're going to order in Thai and have a Bogart film festival. And I'll call Dr. Dunaway in the morning."
"That's my nice well-grounded Bard." She hesitated again. "Eric . . . just remember . . . if you should happen to see your parents again . . . or think about them . . . that you are what you are. So don't make any decisions that you'll regret, before you've made up your mind what you really want to do."
Because the anger of a Bard can kill. Eric heard the words that Ria left unsaid. "I'll be good, Ria," he promised, kissing her lightly on the cheek.
There was a quiet tap on the door, and Eric opened it.
Walking out with George across the penthouse floor of the LlewellCo building—only one bank of elevators ran after five, and it was a long walk to get to them—Eric wondered whether all this could possibly be what Ria really wanted out of life.
And more to the point, could she afford to be such a public figure when she was going to live such an embarrassingly long time? True, she was only half-Elven, and would hardly have the millennium-and-more long lifespan of a full-blooded Sidhe, but even a couple of centuries would be awfully hard to explain. And as Chairman and CEO of LlewellCo, especially after the whole Threshold thing, she was incredibly well-known: on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and Fortune in the last year and a half just for starters. It would be hard for someone like that to just disappear from the public eye, even if she were willing to give up LlewellCo.
Money that does nothing but make more money. Call me an old hippie, but it just all seems . . . pointless, somehow, Eric thought, riding down in the high-speed elevator. Nice, but pointless.
"Have a good evening, Mr. Banyon," George said, as they reached the front door. Eric stepped out onto the street.
"You do the same, George," he said. The night air was raw and cold—unseasonably so—and he turned up the collar of his jacket.
He wondered where Magnus was, and what he was doing.