SEVENTEEN

It was a balmy night, and although Theo wore short sleeves, the air-conditioning in his vehicle—a former Auto with ZERO WASTE and OMBUDSMAN stickers on it—was turned up to arctic levels.

“Warm, are you?” I asked him, climbing inside.

“Sorry,” he said, and turned it down. “I’m from Texas. Hard habit to break. Everything all right back there? With you and Connor, I mean?”

“There isn’t a me and Connor, so yeah, everything’s fine.” Wanting to change the subject and get this particular show on the road, I glanced at him. He looked cool and collected, if excited. “If things get bad in there, you can handle yourself?”

“I don’t have your blade training, but yeah.” He lifted up the hem of his shirt, showing the gun holstered at his waist. “I was with the CPD before I joined the Ombudsman’s office. I’m a certified marksman.”

I blinked. “What? How old are you?”

He smiled. “Twenty-six. I’ve been shooting since I was ten. My parents thought it was weird, but I was good, so they dealt with it.”

“And why the switch to the Ombuds’ office?”

“You ever read comics?”

“Not really.”

“Being a human, supernaturals are kind of ‘other.’ We didn’t really have access to them—the Houses aren’t zoos—so you make assumptions. Immortality, magic, strength. Comics, graphic novels, are how we know about those concepts. That’s how I got interested. I started as an intern, then worked the reception desk when Marge decided to retire.”

“And do you still think we’re superheroes?”

He grinned. “Most of the time, you’re a little more Bruce Wayne than Batman. But the lure’s still there.”

I tilted my head at him. “You looking to join a House?”

“No. My ma’s religious, and that would pretty much kill her.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, she’s old school, despite my efforts to the contrary.”

“There’s only so much you can do.”

* * *

• • •

We drove to the castle and parked outside, found the gate open again. The castle was dark, and the neighborhood was silent but for the whistle of a train in the distance.

“It’s quiet,” Theo said, pulling out his weapon, turning off the safety, and checking the chamber. When he was satisfied, he holstered it again. I belted on my katana.

“It was quiet last night, too,” I said, and we stepped through the gate, walked in moonlight toward the gatehouse. “But not this quiet.”

One of the doors was open several inches. Theo looked inside, then pushed it open all the way.

The gatehouse was empty, the room lit only by the shaft of moonlight. Even the torches were gone, their holders empty.

“The torches were lit last night,” I whispered. “This is where they met us.”

“You didn’t go any farther?”

“No.”

Theo nodded, pulled out his screen, began taking photos.

I walked to the doors that led into the courtyard and pushed. I expected them to be barred from the inside, for the gatehouse’s emptiness to be a trick or a trap, so the weight nearly pulled me inside when the door swung open, revealing a wide avenue of space around the keep, which stood in the middle. There were squares of grass and stone, raised gardens filled with vegetables and flowers, planted trees, and sitting areas where the fairies might have enjoyed the weather.

Like the gatehouse, everything was dark and quiet. The torches were gone, every window in the building dark, with only the moonlight casting shadows across the stone.

I took photos, then slipped back into the gatehouse.

“Anything?” Theo asked. He crouched near the wall, ran a swab along the ground, then slipped it into a clear bag.

“Nothing. No fairies, no lights. There are garden plots that still have food, so they didn’t take everything. But they seem to be gone. What do you have there?”

“Fairy dust.”

“You’re joking.”

He rose, slipped the bag into his pocket. “Entirely,” he said with a grin. “I’m just pulling a forensic sample.” He looked up and around. “It’s not often we have an opportunity to inspect a fairy house.”

“Glad I could help.” I glanced back toward the doors. “We need to check the keep.”

“Yeah,” he said, and followed me into the courtyard, then let out a low whistle. “This is impressive.”

“Yeah.” The tower loomed in front of us. It was difficult to estimate stories given the irregular windows sprinkled across the front facade, but I guessed at least four.

“You want to take the building or the courtyard?” Theo asked.

“I’ll take the keep,” I said, too curious to pass up the chance to walk through the fairies’ home.

“You okay going alone? And I’m not saying I doubt your skills with what is probably a really sharp katana.” He cast a wary glance at the door. “I wouldn’t want to go in there alone.”

“There’s no one in there.”

He looked back at me. “How do you know?”

“Magic,” I said. “There was a lot more of it last night just because there were so many of them here. I wasn’t sure until I walked into the courtyard. But they’re gone.” I looked up at the tower. “I mean, still creepy. Still possibly haunted and booby-trapped. But I can deal with that.”

I’d dealt with worse monsters.

“Here,” he said, and pulled a small flashlight from his pocket, then checked the time on his screen. “Twenty minutes. You aren’t back by then, I’m coming to find you. And don’t make me do that.”

“I’ll do my best.” I checked the time, then flicked on the light and headed toward the keep.

Theo didn’t need to know my hands were sweating.

* * *

• • •

The doors were unlocked. I pushed one open, slipped the flashlight into the gap, and spun the beam around the space. No movement, no sound, no fairies, so I slipped inside but froze just inside the door in case of a booby trap. Once again, there was only silence.

The room was tall—two stories of stone, the walls covered in embroidered tapestries, the windows covered by long velvet curtains. There were alcoves on both sides of the room, stairs disappearing as they curved upward. There were woven rugs on the floors, a long table in the center of the room flanked by benches, and an enormous fireplace with a hearth that was nearly ten feet long. At the other end was an ornate throne in gorgeously carved and gleaming wood. This was probably the central gathering room, the place where the fairies ate and socialized and took their instructions from Claudia.

But there was no sign of the fairies now, only the things they’d left behind. That included a fine layer of dust that had settled sometime within the last twenty-four hours, probably stirred up when they’d gathered their belongings and left the property. And it smelled green, like asparagus and freshly cut grass just beginning to decay.

I flipped a mental coin and took the staircase on the right, a spiral of stone steps cantilevered into the wall. No rails, no bannisters. I kept a hand on the stone and stayed as close to the wall as possible, then made my way up to the second floor. A passageway curved away from the stairs, and I stepped through and into a narrow hall with several doors on one side and windows on the other.

The window glass was wavy and bubbled, and I figured that was an artistic choice to better match the medieval feel of the place. They looked over the courtyard, and I watched Theo’s flashlight bob here and there as he searched it.

The doors were open to small bedrooms that weren’t unlike the dorms at Cadogan House. More gorgeous wooden furniture, including several beds with posts carved into climbing vines and flowers. Fairies might have been assholes, but they had really good taste in home decor.

The passageway curved again, and after a stretch of twenty or thirty feet, dead-ended in another arched wooden door. This one was nearly as tall as the gatehouse doors, which made me think I’d reached the queen’s room.

I listened for a moment, trying to ignore the thud of my heartbeat. And when I confirmed the room was silent, I opened the door.

The other rooms had been mostly empty, but orderly. This one was chaos.

The ceilings were higher than in the other bedrooms, two stories of stone that soared to a grid of wooden beams, with golden flowers painted between them. There were two tall windows, once covered by thick curtains. But the velvet, in deep and shimmering blue, lay in piles on the floor.