I then felt warm breath against my neck as someone whispered, “Hush, I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk to you.” I didn’t recognize the voice, even as I mentally ran through the voices of everyone I’d ever met. “I’ll let you go if you won’t scream. Will you scream?”
I figured I wouldn’t go to hell for breaking my promise if he turned out to be dangerous, so I shook my head. He eased his grip on me, and I turned around. “Earl?” I blurted. “What are you doing here? Did the Elf Lord send you?”
The young elf glanced frantically around. “Shhhh! Don’t talk about him! He doesn’t know I’m here. I don’t work for him. Well, okay, I do, but he’s not the one I’m really working for.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I want to help you find the Knot before the Elf Lord does.”
“And grabbing me and scaring me half to death was the best way you could think of to announce that you want to be friends?” I asked, putting one hand on my hip and glaring up at him. “You’re lucky Owen doesn’t have any powers right now. He tends to go psycho when he thinks I’m in danger.” I raised my voice and called out, “Owen! Rod! I’m okay. I’m over here.”
Earl made a noise that sounded something like “Yrrggheeegg” while his eyes bugged out and his ears wiggled in panic. “Why’d you do that?” he moaned.
“If you’ve got something to say, you can say it to all of us at once.” Then I remembered what we’d been running from and added, “And this might not be the best place to have this discussion. Someone’s following us.”
“I know. That was me.”
“No, there was someone else, a woman.”
Owen and Rod reached us, and Owen said, “Earl? Does this mean the Elf Lord wants to cooperate?”
“Actually, Earl’s freelancing,” I said. “But why don’t we get away from here before we chat? My grandmother has been left unsupervised for far too long.”
“We’ll need a diversion because that woman in black is still out there,” Rod said.
“I’m good at diversions,” Earl said. He held out his hand, palm up, and a small orb of light formed on it. He blew on the orb, sending it flying, then said to us, “Go, and don’t look at it.” We ran for the elevators as the orb zoomed around just below the ceiling. The woman who’d been following us spotted us, but before she could make a move, there was a bright flash of light that would have been blinding if we’d been looking at it. We made it safely to the elevator, and Rod hit a couple of extra buttons so it wouldn’t be obvious from outside where we were heading.
As I expected, we found Granny and Thor in the lingerie section. Thor was waiting uncomfortably while Granny harangued a saleswoman. “Did you find what you sought?” Thor asked us. Then he growled at the back of his throat when he saw Earl. “An elf? Are you double-crossing me?”
“You’re working with him?” Earl asked.
“We don’t yet know what’s really going on with either of you,” Owen said.
“I take it you didn’t find what you wanted, then,” Thor said.
“No, false alarm,” Rod said.
Thor glared up at Earl. “So, elf, what’s your game? Are you a lackey of the Elf Lord?”
“I am a spy in the court of the Elf Lord. My people want to make sure he doesn’t obtain the Knot or the Eye. I believe the best way to ensure that is to help these wizards who plan to destroy the brooch.”
“How do we know we can trust you?”
Earl shrugged. “How do we know we can trust anyone in this group?”
Granny came over to us, scowling. “I thought this was supposed to be a big store, but they don’t have a proper girdle, just those Spandex panties,” she said. “I don’t hold with this Spandex stuff. Don’t trust it at all.” She noticed Earl and said, “My, I didn’t realize they made your kind this big.”
“Granny, Earl is an elf,” I explained. “He’s different from the wee folk back home.”
“There are factions among the elves?” Rod asked Earl. “We hadn’t heard anything about that.”
“The Elf Lord would like a return to the old ways, when he held absolute power. Many of us would prefer that not happen. His office now is mostly ceremonial, and for some of us, even that is too much.”
“You’re trying to eliminate the position entirely,” I translated.