“Miles?” She made another sound far too mild for having just learned her son was dangling by talons a hundred feet off the ground. “This aves, can you further define it?”
“Basically like an owl but the size of a bus, and it was sort of disappearing and reappearing over and over.”
“Surely you do not mean a cailleach?”
“No clue, I don’t know anything about magic, I don’t even know how I got his phone to work, I just really need your help,” she admitted, voice going raw.
“Oh, dear, well, do you happen to be near a tree?”
“Yes!” Hope flourished in Piper’s chest.
“Allow me a few moments to access your location.”
The small screen of Kol’s tablet whirred, constellations and numbers spinning over what had simply been a blue screen pulsing with a white dot. Piper tried to follow the sequences, holding it close to her face, eyes crossing. The light brightened then, blinding her, and she jerked back into the tree.
Only there wasn’t a tree behind her anymore, there was a woman.
Piper shrieked and flailed, jumping away from the sudden arrival and the tree at her back that had opened up, the bark peeled away from its center and leaving a door through which the woman had apparently come. She was like a specter, terrifyingly beautiful with dark, arched brows and a smooth, pale face, reddened lips, flowing black hair, and, oh boy, Piper could see where Kol got it from. Except the ears, those were significantly longer yet elegantly tapered toward the back of her head. But she also looked about thirty years too young to have given birth to Kol.
“Oh, how charming.” Her small mouth turned up, and her eyes sparkled like they were covered in frost.
Piper caught her breath and swallowed hard, heart still rattling inside her ribs like a trapped moth. “You’re Kol’s mom?”
She nodded slowly, grin slipping away. “And you are?”
“He’ll be pecked to death before I can possibly explain.”
“Cailleach tend to favor their talons, though they are also known for swallowing their prey whole.”
Piper’s blood went cold as she took in the woman’s placid face, and then she threw her hands into the air. “I don’t see how that’s better—he’ll be dead either way unless we do something!” Her throat went raw as she shouted, tears pricking at her eyes. “It’s all my fault, and I yelled at him, and I told him he could go, but I didn’t really want him to go! I want him to stay, but I especially don’t want him to die! Please,pleasetell me you can help me get him back!”
The woman stepped forward, closing the space between them, and Piper truly felt small. Taller than Kol, the not-human-ness of the elf finally fell on Piper as fully as the hands that cupped her face. She wore no gloves, but her fingers were warm, and Piper could feel the heat spread through her whole body like being injected with a sedative. “We will find him, youngling,” she said, and then her brow knit ever so slightly. “You are…entirely human?”
Piper nodded, a calming daze settling into her bones.
“So full of love, how could you not be?” She released Piper’s face and straightened. “Come, we will deliver my son from his troubles.”
Piper’s hand was taken by the elf’s long, slender fingers, and she stepped toward the still-open tree.
“Wait, I can’t—”
Except Piper could—she could doanythingwith an elucidai elf holding her hand because pure elucidai magic was a thing to behold. Unfortunately, Piper wasn’t really in a position to behold anything, not when her brain was being pulled out of her bellybutton and her mouth had been stuffed with mushrooms and fresh-cut grass.
Piper was walking and falling and jumping, and the world was also moving around her all so quickly she could make zero sense of it which was probably for the best since tree-walking wasn’t meant to be comprehensible to humans. Elves hardly understood it themselves, not that they would ever admit it.
Tree-walking was also extremely fast, and before Piper really could process that she was moving through bark and roots, the darkness around her cleared, and she was somewhere else.
She was walked forward, hand held like she were in a dream, and a knot in the nearest maple unfurled. They stepped into another tree, and Piper’s kneecaps were in her eyeballs, the sound of exactly one hundred and forty-two earthworms wiggling in the dirt that filled her ears.
When the bark cleared once again, the altitude hit her so fast she began to faint, but the elf kept her aloft just long enough to step into yet another tree. Piper’s appendix went to Brazil, her lungs to Jakarta, and her gallbladder appeared for a brief but disturbing moment in a China cabinet in Middlebury, Ohio before cobbling back together normally—or as normal as anyone can ever be after tree walking.
“Ah, there is my firstborn.” The elf sounded as pleased as she had been about everything else.
Beside her, Piper openly wept, overcome with gladness both to have her innards in place and to have found him.
A surprisingly strong hand pressed into her back, reminding her there was more to be done. Piper wiped at her eyes and gazed skyward. High above them, a copse of white pines had coalesced, twisting around one another and forming a massive hollow. It could have been called a nest if it were smaller, but the twigs were made of entire trees, white birches bent and twisted around narrow aspens, and it justcouldn’tbe real, but there was that bird perched at its edge, massive and white. Its head twisted around on a neck that just shouldn’t be able to do that, and yellow eyes peered down at them.
“Good evening,” called the elf, and though she hadn’t really raised her voice, the sound traveled. “We do not mean to intrude on your meeting, but we have come to offer assistance.”
