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  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, th
is 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.