No Quest For The Wicked

His expensive suit hung in rags and his formerly perfectly coiffed hair stuck out in every direction, with twigs and leaves tangled in it. If he’d been shorter and wearing green, he’d have looked like some of the less-sanitized drawings I’d seen of Peter Pan.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Earl slipping into the throng of park denizens, probably so his supposed boss didn’t catch him hanging out with the enemy. I didn’t think he was in too much trouble, though, because Sylvester was too far gone to notice anything but the brooch and anything that stood between him and the brooch.

The closer he came to us, the madder he looked. He was breathing heavily, sounding like a bull gearing up to charge. “Mine! It’s mine! And you’ve got it!” he snarled. He advanced slowly, but then, all of a sudden, he ran at us, waving his tree branch like a club. Rod stepped out in front of him and hit him with a spell that left the air feeling charged with magic, but it didn’t slow Sylvester down at all.

Owen caught my arm and we jumped out of the way, but no matter how we dodged, Sylvester kept up with us. The whole time, he made a musical keening sound in the back of his throat. It was part rage, part yearning, part mourning, and entirely creepy. I’d heard music that I thought ought to be classified as a weapon, but the elves really had music in their arsenal. The noise grew even worse as some of the park denizens took up his cry and added their keening to his.

Then there was a thud and a cry of pain, and I looked back to see Sylvester lying full-length on the ground and Granny standing nearby, twirling her cane like a victorious gunfighter twirling his six-shooter. Rod rushed over and kicked Sylvester’s branch out of reach, then Granny gave Sylvester a good whack on the back of the head with her cane.

Only when it appeared that the Elf Lord was completely unconscious did Earl emerge from his hiding place among the park denizens. “He’s really taking this seriously, huh?” he said, kicking his boss’s leg.

“He must have been around the Eye for a while between the time he found it and the time he sent it to the gnomes to be merged with the Knot,” Owen said. “It’s infected him. I’m not sure he’ll ever be truly happy again without it.”

“I wonder if he’s got some residual protection from having owned the Knot,” Rod said. “That spell should have dropped him. It did drop him when I used it on him earlier, but this time it didn’t even slow him down.”

“We’d better split before he wakes up,” I said. We headed out, our strange retinue following us. They kept a respectful distance from me, but I still worried that one of them would pull a Sylvester and go mad trying to get the brooch.

As a result, I probably overreacted when I felt someone reaching for my right pocket. I kicked out while throwing an elbow, then cringed when I recognized Rod’s voice, sounding strained with pain, saying, “Sorry! Don’t know what came over me.”

“Yes, you do,” Owen said mildly.

“It told me to take it,” Rod said. “It kept yelling at me in my head, until I had to do it.”

Owen moved around me to protect my right side. “Now you’ll have to get through me,” he warned his friend.

“That may not stop me,” Rod admitted.

“Then I’ll try not to break any bones.”

“I would appreciate that.”

“But try to pull yourself together, okay? We need your help, but we don’t need another liability.”

To emphasize Owen’s point, Granny gave Rod a light whack across the legs with her cane. “You can focus better than that,” she scolded. “Ignore the brooch. You don’t strike me as the kind of young man who’d take orders from jewelry. Show some backbone!” She punctuated her pep talk with yet another tap from her cane.

Shouts behind us made me pause to look back to see a commotion in the crowd. I couldn’t help but scream as Sylvester came rushing out of the crowd of elves and fairies, tossing them aside to clear his path as he ran right at us.

“What is he, some kind of pointy-eared Terminator?” I complained as Owen moved me out of Sylvester’s path. The Elf Lord’s momentum kept him going on the wrong course for a moment, and in that spare moment, I dug into my purse. “I vote we use the dart.”

“It’s our last one, and Rod’s already giving us trouble,” Owen argued without taking his eyes off Sylvester. He moved me aside again while I continued rummaging in my handbag, searching by feel for the dart case.

“But Rod’s been pretty easy to snap out of it. So far, neither magic nor physical force have been enough to stop Sylvester, but we know the tranquilizer kept him out for a good half hour. It might not last as long this time, but maybe it’ll keep him out long enough for us to deal with this.” My fingers closed on the case, and I took it out of my purse just as Owen had to pull me away from Sylvester again.