TERRESTRIAL NAVIGATION

A/N1: Those who reviewed this author's previous work have my gratitude for your time and trouble in offering encouragement and suggestions or even just approval. Many thanks.

A/N2: For those who took the summary lightly: if you would throw a Jane Austen across the room rather than read it, it is probably safer for your monitor or phone if you do not read this. She was a genius. I am not. Caveat lector.

PART 1

Chapter 1

Bo was trailing Dyson as he followed his nose to an empty lot with a cargo container sitting in it. Behind her was another Light fae, Kristin, whose girlfriend had missed meeting up with her two hours ago and hadn't answered her phone. Kristin had just arrived in town and hadn't known Dyson. She'd picked up one of Bo's flyers, recognized her name (as who did not after the Garuda?) and called her instead and Bo had brought the detective on board. Dyson had used police resources to locate the missing woman's phone and tracked her from there.

"She's in there," Dyson said, looking at the cargo container. "I'm going to take a quick circuit to look for trouble. DON'T .." he fixed a gimlet eye on Bo and Kristin, ".. approach until I get back. I don't want to have to save you two as well."

"We'll stay put," Bo assured him. Kristin, controlled despite her obvious worry, just nodded.

Five minutes later, Dyson trotted up and beckoned them on to the cargo container. As he tore up the chain and padlock, his nose wrinkled and reflexively he jerked his head away only to face front again immediately. Then Bo caught it, the scent of unwashed bodies, but thankfully not decomposition.

Dyson hauled the door open. Kristin sprang in with Bo on her heels.

"Lise?" Kristin's dark head swiveled as she searched, taking in the dull eyes of about seven women slumped in various attitudes of exhaustion and dishevelment on the floor. "My god, what is this? Lise!" She darted to a diminutive prone figure with straw-coloured hair.

It groaned. "Ohh … my fucking head!"

Bo smiled despite the circumstances. Lise sounded well and truly alive, certainly alive enough to be pissed.

"Bo?" Dyson said in a low voice. "No fae scents other than the four of us. Get them clear. It might be human trafficking. I have to call the rest of my colleagues, humans and all, to deal with this."

The three of them cleared out accordingly. Kenzi was with a cousin overnight so Bo accepted an invitation to have dinner with Kristin and Lise, who had fully recovered from her sedation after an hour in the open air and a cup of hot sweet tea.

"So, how long have you two been together?" she asked a bit enviously once they were settled in a restaurant.

"Two years and three months." Kristin said promptly.

"And four days," added Lise, pinching a bit of skin on the back of Kristin's hand gently and waggling it while she raised a teasing eyebrow at her girlfriend. "Do you have a significant other, Bo?"

Bo's throat tightened. "You know I'm a succubus," she began haltingly, "but …"

"So?" Kristin shrugged.

Bo, surprised out of her incipient depression by this, inhaled sharply. After a second, she realized her that her mouth was hanging open. "Wow," she said. "Usually people just assume that means I wouldn't have a significant other."

"I see how that might be," Lise said. "But they do, you know. Succubi and incubi, I mean. Not all, of course, but it happens. They might have polyamorous unions though that's a pretty complicated dynamic that few people have the energy to maintain. Or they might have a harem or a list of regular feeds but the actual relationship outside of feeding is very variable."

"You know other succubi?" Bo asked eagerly. "I'm told we're rare."

"You are. In Europe, earlier last century I saw only one around," Kristin said. "Heard mention of another."

"Me too," Lise chimed in. "Kris and I hadn't met then. We might have come across different ones. I met one near the French Alps and I heard about one in … let's see ….. I think it was Lithuania. And a couple of centuries earlier, I crossed paths with one active in Spain."

"Can you tell me about them? Please!"

"Sure," Lise nodded agreeably.

For the next half hour Bo listened attentively as Kristin and Lise took it in turns to talk. After her mother's frighteningly well-masked instability and rage, it was a relief to hear about normal succubi.

"So you see," Lise finished, "it seems to depend on the individual succubus's preferences. They seem to vary as individuals like everyone else."

Bo's excitement deflated suddenly. "So it's just me then," she muttered to herself.

"Sorry, what was that?"

Kristin and Lise had given her information freely. With Lauren gone, there wasn't any reason not to tell them about her. Truth to tell, Bo was longing for someone new to talk it over with. These women had life experience and a perspective Kenzi and Bo's other friends didn't have and she liked them.

"You asked me if I have a significant other. Well I did," she said sadly. "We parted ways a bit over month ago."

"You don't have to talk about it," Kristin said, "but we'll listen if you want to."

So Bo talked in her turn. For a long time. She didn't cry but she was feeling weepy by the time she finished.

The pair across from her exchanged glances now and then but they didn't interrupt.

"…. So we searched and searched and couldn't find her. Lauren's really smart. If she wanted us to find her, we would have, which means she didn't want us to. She really didn't want me, not even to help when she's in danger ….." she concluded dismally. "I guess you can tell I'm still pretty down about it."

"Not surprising. That's a heckuva history," Kristin said, "and it hasn't been that long."

Lise rested her chin on her hand. "Bo, did you want advice or thoughts from us or did you just need to tell the story? We don't mind either way, do we, Kris?"

"Of course not," Kristin said.

"I … I guess I need an outsider's perspective," Bo said. "You see, everyone I'm friends with already has their view and most of them weren't in favour of the relationship. They all said it wouldn't work because Lauren was human."

"Oh, I see, the rule against fae-human relationships," Lise nodded in understanding.

"No, they thought it wouldn't work because she couldn't sustain me," Bo said. "And I won't follow the rule because it's stupid. Stupid rules are the main reason I stay unaligned."

"But that's ridiculous. Feeding isn't the basis for any couple's relationship that I know of, human or fae. That kind of dependency can't be healthy." Lise frowned. This comforted Bo a lot.

"Most fae follow the rule, though. How did Lauren stay safe?" Kristin asked.

"We were covert after Hale was appointed Ash. He's our friend but of course he couldn't be seen to flout the rules."

Kristin's dark brows drew together as she scrunched her aquiline features in confusion. "I agree with Lise that your friends' skepticism is not based on an objection that makes sense, but I don't understand how you were planning to continue in the long term."

"We hadn't got there yet," Bo said.

"Are you sure that's true for Lauren?" Kristin asked. "Medical school takes years and it doesn't sound like she came to the fae fresh out of it. And then there's the years she spent with the Light. At the sort of age she must be, it would be reasonable for a human to want to settle down."

"I never even thought of that," Bo admitted. "You see what I mean about it being me?" she sighed, squeezing her temples between the fingers of one hand.

"Possibly…," Kristin said calmly.

Bo felt crushed.

" … but you can learn, can't you?" Kristin continued. "Ow, Lise!" She rubbed her arm where Lise had pinched her, not gently this time, and gave her girlfriend an injured look.

"Sorry love, I didn't realise you hadn't finished your sentence. I'll make it up to you." Lise planted a quick kiss on the pinched spot.

Mollified, Kristin asked, "How old are you, Bo?"

"Oh man, I can't take her anywhere," Lise shook her head, looking apologetically at Bo.

"No, look, we can't give an opinion on anything if we don't know what we need to, right?" Kristin argued. "She doesn't have to be exact."

"It's OK," Bo said. "I'm thirty-ish."

"That's still awfully young even by human standards, Bo, more like twenties when it comes to relationships if you didn't have any for ten years after you left home," Kristin said. "Humans and fae in their twenties and thirties make mistakes all the time. These things take time and experience to learn. You can and will do better if you want to."

"This was my first relationship," Bo said. "So I guess you're right. It just hurts so much that she's gone and obviously doesn't want me. I can't make it right."

Lise said kindly, "Bo, you don't seem to know if you did anything wrong, let alone what it was. We don't know Lauren's perspective."

"She said it was everything else she'd been through and I can understand that but why wouldn't she let me help after all the Dawning craziness was over? And then she also said she would always be asking more of me than I could give. That's the part that involves me so it's really bugging me because I don't know it means. She made it sound like it was all on her but I think she just didn't want me to stick around and argue. And she's not the sort to yell, even if I had done anything wrong. I want to know what to apologise for and what to do better. I mean, it sounds like she didn't want to put up with me feeding from others but she did before and Lauren's rational and very adult. She's always known I had to feed. We even worked out a system together that she thought she could handle."

"Sometimes," Lise said, "what people know isn't the same as how they feel. Maybe it hurt her, even though she knew you had to feed."

"I'm not saying you're wrong because that makes sense. I just don't want to think that," Bo said, "because it means I can never get her back."

Chapter 2

Lauren was drinking coffee from a to-go cup outside a police station in Calgary.

Taft hadn't been interested in isolating fae scents and there'd been none to pilfer. Lauren had brought some from the Light labs, together with her false IDs, but once she had defied Taft, he had confiscated her things and she hadn't been able to find them again. She had found a bottle of pungent aftershave in someone's drawer after destroying Taft's work and had doused herself with it liberally from head to toe before she dug out car keys from jackets and coats abandoned in the lab by staff were either dead or hopefully had fled instead. She'd gone into the car park, tried all the keys and chosen a fuel-efficient sedan to drive to Montreal, which was far enough away from that dreadful place that a scent-tracker like Dyson would have lost her trace by the time the effects of the aftershave had faded. Then she'd driven around until she found a dodgy enough scrapyard that had given her cash without asking for ID or title documents and she'd watched them crush the sedan beyond recognition.

Some of the cash went on the tortuously long bus journey from Montreal to Calgary. It was easy to avoid being noticed in cities, and trains and buses didn't require ID. Calgary was big enough and a long, long way away from Toronto. She'd wanted to keep off the fae radar as long she could.

Her current ID, debit and credit cards were traceable. The fae would have software spotters that would bleep an automatic alert if that ID turned up in employment records. So she had done odd jobs for the last month or so and made enough for food and a room. It might have been a somewhat squalid existence but Lauren had taken pleasure from the change, from not facing life and death circumstances all the time. She might have had a better standard of life under the Ash in material terms, but the sheer pleasure of being able to sit for an hour with a doughnut and coffee and read the newspaper or think about nothing in particular, or exchange cheerful backchat as an equal with the greengrocer or the people she did jobs for, was something Lauren had been so long without and she relished every second of it.

She'd even spent last night with a woman who had picked her up while she was having dinner. It had been a much-needed lighthearted interlude, not just a reminder that she was alive but also that despite clothes courtesy of the Salvation Army store and Walmart, despite not even looking for a hook up, she could still pull them. She must have given a good enough account of herself in bed because in the morning she had been given not just breakfast but a sandwich for lunch, wrapped in butcher paper and pressed into her hand with a goodbye kiss. They'd smiled at each other, knowing they would never see each other again.

That woman, whose name she hadn't even retained because it was meant to be an anonymous encounter, had given her a boost of confidence and energy which Lauren would always thank her for. Because now two men in dark suits, off-the-shelf from the fit of them, were looking at her from across the way.

Even if she had been able to get work in a lab without ID or a credible employment record for the last eight years, she wouldn't have been able to synthesize fae scents to wear without fae biological material to start with. So she had always expected to be found. It was just a matter of when. She'd been dragging it out because she had been so desperate to re-connect with the human world again while not under someone's thumb, even if only for a finite time.

The guys looking at her were most likely the Morrigan's people. Light fae heavies wore grey suits, not dark ones, and these guys had that indefinable air of the Dark about them. And if these were indeed the Morrigan's men, and they knew who she was under the baseball cap and sunglasses and un-Dr-Lewis-like clothes, then they must have a preternatural ability to recognize people.

Bugger.

A hunted person's scent couldn't be broadcast to all fae everywhere like an APB. Besides, the Dark would have had no access to her things in the Light apartment. If the Morrigan had sent scent-trackers to Taft's lab, it would have been impossible for them to identify Lauren's scent out of the plethora hanging in the air there and of course, there had been the aftershave….. So the Light and Dark fae littered about the general populace and not tasked specifically with finding her would no doubt be looking only for the face on a poster in the local waystation or Light and Dark compounds if they bothered to look at all. Therefore if Dark fae with special people-finding abilities had tracked her down, it meant the Morrigan was actively searching for her.

She'd spotted the two men eying her ten minutes ago while buying her coffee and had walked straight to the police station along the busiest streets to buy time to think. Now that they had a current location for her, even if she evaded them now, they would still have a city on which to concentrate the search. They could call for help and that help would definitely cover the transport hubs. At some point, she wouldn't be able to hide or run anymore in Calgary.

Prolonging the hunt would mean a period of continuous hiding and anxiety. She had limited funds. The longer she dragged it out, the likelier it was that in the end when they caught up with her, as they certainly would, they would take out their frustration on her. Right now, she had a small degree of control of the situation. So with infinite wistfulness, she resigned herself once more to the loss of her freedom.

Okay, Lewis, fish or cut bait.

She looked straight at them and beckoned them across. They came and hovered over her.

"You know who I am?"

"We do."

"You from the Morrigan?"

An inclination of a blocky head.

"Are you intending to kill me?" Lauren didn't know how she kept her sangfroid, except out of sheer bloody-minded pride.

"Not our orders." Squarehead was evidently the spokesman of the two. She was relieved not to have the additional task of persuading the Morrigan's minions not to kill her just for the hell of it.

"So what do you want with me?"

"We're to take you with us."

"Where?" Like they would answer. Lauren asked anyway just to draw out the last precious seconds of liberty she would probably never know again.

"You'll see. Will you come quietly?"

Lauren nodded. "Yes. I would, however, prefer not to be manhandled while I'm not resisting. The Morrigan will get a lot more out of me if I'm not distracted by bruises and pain. If you attempt to use force gratuitously, I give you fair warning that I will make it difficult enough that in trying to subdue me, you may very well end up killing me. Fragile human, remember? So if you don't control yourselves, you'll end up with nothing but a dead source of information the Morrigan might want. An irreplaceable source."

They surveyed her anew, clearly not expecting this show of spirit.

"So you tell me what you want me to do and we'll start by not attracting attention here on the street under the noses of the police."

"We have a car." Squarehead gestured with his thumb.

"Fine. Lead the way and I'll walk beside your buddy."

They drove to an airfield, climbed on a charter plane and landed at a private airfield with a good view of the Toronto cityscape. Another car was waiting for them. A few minutes before they reached the outskirts of Toronto, Squarehead's colleague held up a blindfold. Lauren sighed and submitted.

When they took off the blindfold, Lauren was in what looked like a small room in a seedy motel.

Squarehead went out.

"So can I shower? Without being disturbed?"

The remaining man made a 'have at it' gesture and Lauren went, thankful for a little time alone.

She briefly contemplated escape, but decided that she probably couldn't incapacitate her guard and even if she could, she wouldn't have enough of a headstart to steal a car and get far enough away to mask her trail. Cars these days were hard to steal if you weren't a professional about it. She showered.

Squarehead came back with pizza and soft drinks and then left again. Lauren ate and drank and then eyed one of the beds. Guardman looked at her.

Lauren said steadily, "If you're thinking of doing anything…. questionable, bear in mind that I will be seeing the Morrigan. I will have ample opportunity to explain why I 'm too traumatized to remember the things she wants me to tell her." She held his eyes. He looked away and remained where he was.

Lauren didn't know if the orders he had required her to be unharmed. If he decided to gratify himself with her, she would have little choice but to endure. He was probably at least three times as strong as she, and twice her weight. Resistance would just result in unnecessary injury and whatever else happened to the rest of her body, Lauren had to protect her head. It was her only asset and her only weapon. She didn't sleep well.

It was morning when Squarehead reappeared with breakfast and a briefcase just after Lauren's second shower. He let her eat and drink and then cleared the table, opened the briefcase and took out a stack of files, a clean pad of paper and a pen, which he put on the table in front of her.

"Write the diagnosis and remedy for each case on a sheet and put it in the case file."

Ah, a test. To doublecheck her identity. Maybe also to see if she would be more useful alive than dead but Lauren wouldn't bank on it. The Morrigan might prefer the secrets of the Light in Lauren's head to Lauren alive and sane. If so, she could extract those secrets by the myriad ghoulish means at her disposal, leaving Lauren a useless gibbering wreck fit only to be put out of her misery: in the end there probably wouldn't even be a body to find. At this moment, all Lauren could be sure of was that the Morrigan wanted certainty that the person she had actually was the Light doctor. She had to be prepared to negotiate for her life and Lauren wasn't good at negotiations.

She did as she was asked. It took almost two hours. Squarehead packed the finished files away and departed.

When he returned hours later, he brought lunch and they ate silently together. It took yet another hour for his phone to ring.

They brought her to the Dark compound of course. Lauren spent the drive preparing the arguments she would advance to the Morrigan in defence of her life and wishing she were better at the art of persuasion. As they drove through the gate, she took note of the new barrier and the guns. Not only handguns but assault rifles too. The Morrigan had upped her security.