“Can you ID the car? The people? Can they track it?”

“That’s just it,” he said. “We can reasonably confirm that your friend was taken from the hotel. But the men are wearing scarves over their faces, and the car’s registration plate has been covered with tape. They could very easily have driven to the next block, pulled the tape off, and blended into traffic. The make and color of the car are common enough it’ll be difficult to spot them. We’re looking at CCTV footage from surrounding areas, but it’ll take time. I’ll let you know if we find anything more.”

He was going through a lot of trouble for us, which was kind and a little heartbreaking. “Thank you.”

With such slim clues to follow, I tried to reconstruct what had happened. They’d caught Tyler by surprise in his room. They must have said something reasonable to convince him to open the door—there hadn’t been any sign of a break-in. Once inside, though, they must have revealed themselves, and he’d struggled, but they had some way of quickly overpowering him. Tranquilizer darts, probably—I’d seen them work on werewolves before. They’d loaded him into one of those hotel laundry bins, taken him down a service elevator with no one the wiser. And it had all happened four hours ago. What were we doing four hours ago?

The riot. Luis and I had been struggling to the front of the crowd, and the attack on Esperanza had come right around then.

“Was it a setup?” I said out loud, wonderingly.

“Was what a setup?” Ben asked. “What are you thinking?”

“Crazy conspiracy theory,” I said. “The same time Tyler was being loaded into the car, the riot was breaking out in front of the hotel.”

“A distraction?” Ben said. “It would sound crazy if it didn’t actually make sense.”

“What are we dealing with here?” I continued, thinking aloud. “Whoever took Tyler also has the wherewithal to instigate riots?”

“It would have just taken the guy with the bucket of blood to tip that crowd over the edge,” Cormac said.

I called Nick again, told him about the correlation with the riot, and suggested looking for the guy with the bucket of blood. He might be a thread back to whoever had Tyler. Nick said he’d pass the information along to the police.

We walked back to the front of the hotel, but I didn’t know where to go from there. The police were working on it. We’d followed the leads we knew to follow. Caleb was searching—without a lot of chance of success, but still searching.

It wasn’t enough.

I stopped, and Ben and Cormac stopped with me, turning to look.

“Cormac,” I said. “We have a fairy wish to use.”

Ben chuckled. “You think that’s for real?”

Cormac ignored him. “You sure you want to use it on this? We might be able to find Tyler without it.”

“Alive?” I said, and Cormac didn’t answer. “Yes. I can’t think of anything better to use it on.”

“You’re both talking like this is actually going to work,” Ben said. “There’s magic and then there’s…” He paused, a sour taste puckering his mouth.

“And then there’s fairies. Yup,” I said.

Chapter 21

CORMAC SUGGESTED moving into the open, to make it easier for the Fae to hear us. We deferred to his wisdom. Hyde Park was a few blocks down the main road from the hotel. I kept touching my phone, checking for calls that I might have missed, but hadn’t. No one had called to say that they’d found Tyler and everything was okay. The sun was sinking, the shadows growing longer, twilight threatening. The vampires would be awake soon, and I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

The park was as gorgeous as ever, a startling oasis in the middle of the city. Joggers were out, along with people walking home after work, and others playing with dogs who looked at us askance, ears flattened, knowing something was off about us. One, a bristly German shepherd, barked until his owner pulled him away, giving us a muddled apology, Bruce wasn’t normally so rude, and so on. We avoided the dogs as best we could.

Cormac led us to an out-of-the-way glade, near a stand of trees, and—a statue of Peter Pan, depicted as a slender, elfin child playing a pipe. He might have brought us to the spot on purpose.

Cormac pulled the scarf out of a jacket pocket and handed it over. It tingled in my hand. Was it just the shimmering texture of the fabric, or something more?

“What do I do now?”

“It’s the Fae. Make a wish,” he said.

“Just like that?” Ben said.

Coiling the scarf around my hands, I closed my eyes and thought about finding Tyler. Wished I could find him, right now, nearby, whole and unharmed. I drew a breath, smelled the grass, trees, the contained nature of the park hemmed in by the odor of city. Heard traffic, footsteps, a barking dog. Ben and Cormac standing still, breathing softly. It all felt so incongruously calm.

Something hit me from behind, like someone shoving in a crowd. I jumped and looked.

The young women from the conference and the restaurant, the ones who’d started the whole thing, stood arm in arm, looking at me, grinning wide, their big eyes shining. Daisy and Rose.

“Where’d they come from?” Ben hissed, looking around in a panic.

“You wouldn’t understand,” said a newcomer, who also seemed to have appeared from thin air, but might have walked from behind the stand of trees, except that I hadn’t heard or smelled her coming. And I’d been listening.

Wearing a beaded skirt, a shapeless blouse, a shawl that seemed to be made of flower petals, and an annoyed expression creasing her elfin face, she was the regal woman from the other night. Now, at dusk instead of full dark, she reminded me of sunshine and distant meadows. Her clothing seemed old-fashioned but new at the same time. Her hair appeared to have flowers woven in it, but I couldn’t tell what kind. They were tiny, and shimmered.

“I need help,” I said starkly, holding her scarf out to her.

“You mean you’re not going to ask for a castle or a bag of gold? Hmm.”

“Would we have waited to ask if we were?”

“Yes, of course. You’re the clever kind. At least, you are,” she said to Cormac, who remained standing quietly with his hands in his pockets. “You and the one inside your head.”