Chapter 5
Five
“I’m not sure I like this,” Nick said. He looked at me, color high on his cheeks from embarrassment.
Brushing my thumb across his cheekbones, I added a layer to the glamour I was weaving around him. Nick was an attractive man, but a glamour turned him into something else. He was a foreign creature, something that couldn’t possibly be human, his coloring too different, his eyes too strange.
“No one will recognize me, right?” Nick said. “If Tate even suspects…”
“As much as I would like to tempt you to the dark side where we have good snacks and no health insurance, even your own mom wouldn’t recognize you.” I pulled a mirror out of my satchel and held it up to Nick.
It was a small makeup mirror, and Nick had to turn it at an angle to see the whole of what I’d done. His normally warm brown skin was now an iridescent green with shining blue tattoos streaking across his cheekbones and down his bare chest like he was some deep-sea creature attracting prey.
I’d left his nose alone, but his eyes were now a deep blue like they were made of sapphires. No human could have eyes that navy. For his ears, I’d given him the stereotypical points on the end and decorated them with a series of gold hoops.
His clothes were white, embroidered with gold to match his earrings. There was nothing to mark him as SAPD. There was nothing to mark him as human. It was some of my best work.
My glamour was more subtle, although it still hid me enough that any camera would only pick up a fae.
The magic was familiar, like putting on a glove that hadn’t been worn since winter.
The last time I’d used a glamour this detailed, I’d been trapped in the Summer Court, unsure if I would ever be free of the Far Realm.
“This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve seen you use this magic before, but…”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am pretty awesome.”
“Will it hold up to scrutiny?” Nick said.
“Are you kidding? The only person who can break this is me.”
At that, Nick looked suspicious. “There are no side effects, right?”
“What’s with all the suspicion?” I said. “Are you doubting my abilities?”
“Never,” Nick said. “I just want to make sure I’m not going into work next week looking like an extra on Game of Thrones.”
“Hey, I never ask if you know how to do the circle you’re drawing,” I said. “So, how about you stay in your own lane, alchemist?”
With an amused smile, Nick held up both hands. “Okay, Windrose. I’ll bow to your authority here.”
“Are you ready?” I asked. “I don’t want you to say anything. This is my case. My mess if it goes south.”
“I’m just the backup?” Nick smirked.
“You’re not even backup,” I said. “You’re an observer. Civilian oversight on this operation.”
Nick might not take his boss’s threats seriously, but I couldn’t risk my case getting him in hot water.
“You’re sure they’re going to just let us through?” Nick said.
“Looking the way we do, they’d let us walk into a bank vault if we asked,” I said. “This is San Amaro. If you see a fae, you run.”
With more confidence than I felt, I walked out from behind the dumpster in the alley next to Damon Griffith’s apartment. Nick walked a half step behind me. Even though I’d told him he didn’t need to worry about being my backup, I felt his eyes scanning for threats.
This time when we entered the lobby, the two security guards froze. The one who’d blocked the elevators before pushed his chair back and glanced at the emergency exit as though calculating whether he could make it before we got to them.
“Can… can we help you?” the bolder of the two said.
“Let. Us. Pass,” I hissed. I let my voice echo out like a wave. I wanted to make sure that they saw me and Nick as nightmares.
They both gaped because they were having a fae encounter in the middle of San Amaro, in the middle of the afternoon. For a moment, they glanced at each other, and I saw one shrug.
Taking that is acceptance, I swanned past them, pulling Nick along in my wake.
I pressed the button for the second floor. Beside me, Nick shook his head and bumped his shoulder against mine. “I don’t understand why you don’t go around looking like this all the time. It would solve a lot of your problems.”
“So would walking around with a rocket launcher on my back,” I said, “but you don’t see me doing something that dangerous either, do you?”
We got off the elevator at the second floor and found apartment 208. I pounded my hand against the door, letting each knock resonate like timpani drums in an orchestra. The door trembled on its hinges.
“Damon Griffith,” I said. “You have taken something of ours.”
He didn’t answer, but I didn’t expect him to.
With a twist of my hand, I sent a shot of cold air under his door. I didn’t have a good enough sense of the inside of his apartment to direct it at him. Instead, I settled for chaos.
Behind his apartment door, a whirlwind raged. My voice was clear through the shriek of wind. “Let us in, Damon Griffith, or suffer the consequences.”
“That’s a little Shakespearean,” Nick muttered.
The ruse worked, and the door cracked open. I glared at Damon. “You know why we have come. Show us what you have taken.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Damon said. His eyes bounced between us like he was a horse scared by a snake. “Just, uh, give me a sec?”
He scrambled for something beside the door and drew out his keys.
Shivering, he made his way toward the elevator.
I hoped we wouldn’t have to get into a car with him.
I had a gut feeling that he would keep the body close, though.
It was a lot more valuable than what he’d had in his storage unit, and there were a lot more people who would report him if they saw a dead body, fae or not.
When we got to the bank of elevators, he pressed B. Nick’s hand brushed up the back of my jeans through my glamour. Pushing his finger up under my shirt, he touched it to the exposed skin right above my belt. When I looked at him, he was blushing, the color a deep blue on his green cheeks.
Oh. Oh. The last time I’d shown him what a glamour was, he hadn’t been into it. But me pretending to be the stereotype of a fae was apparently something he could get into. Interesting.
In the basement, there were separate storage units for each apartment. At his own, Damon’s keys trembled against the lock. Eventually, he got the key in and opened the door.
The coffin took up most of the narrow space.
“This is… this is what you want, right?” Damon asked.
I gave him a slow, serious nod and then let out a soft shriek just to see him jump. “This is my kinsman. You have killed my kinsman?”
“No!” Damon said. “No, no. I didn’t have anything to do with his death. I just took the body, I swear.”
“Your face is that of a liar,” I said, putting as much fae as I could into the words. “You will continue to steal our things, what is ancestrally ours.”
“No, no,” he promised. “I won’t deal in fae stuff anymore.”
He was trembling again. I approached the coffin and walked around it as though checking for something.
“You would sell my kinsman,” I said, turning to Damon.
“No, I swear on my mother’s grave,” the liar said. “I wouldn’t.”
I drew air in through my teeth. “You swear on your mother’s still beating heart that you will not steal another of our gifts and sell them?”
Damon swallowed, surprised that we knew his mother was still alive. “Yes.”
“I find this acceptable,” I said. Glancing at Nick, I raised an eyebrow. “What say you?”
Nick inclined his head, his expression blank.
“See that you remember your promise. The consequences will be dire if you do not,” I said. “Now leave us.”
Damon moved so fast I expected to see dust in his wake.
Nick approached the coffin standing beside me. A burial shroud covered it. The fabric was woven with thread so fine it looked as though the weaver had made it from light itself. Magic infused every stitch, making it shimmer and shine when I drew it back from the head of the coffin.
The body inside the glass coffin was perfectly maintained. I wasn’t sure how.
I had never seen a dead fae before. He was small, smaller than me, and his coloring looked like he was from the Spring Court.
I couldn’t tell how long he’d been dead.
Whatever was keeping him looking like the day he’d died was the best spellwork I’d ever seen.
For all I knew, he could’ve been dead for a hundred years or a week.
“How did you know this would work?” Nick said.
“Because no matter how many fae artifacts he had, he wasn’t a professional.” I pointed at the body. “This was the biggest haul he’d ever had. All the rest of the stuff in that storage unit was small time, but this was his first big score. He didn’t know any better than to keep it close.”
Squinting at me, Nick said, “I don’t understand.”
“I know a few black-market people,” I said, “and if any of them had an item like this, they would’ve kept it as far away from themselves as they could have until they sold it.
This pawn shop dealer I know has a secret back room where she keeps all her stuff.
I think it’s a pocket realm or some alchemy trick, but either way, she knows not to keep important stuff with her because there’s always the chance—”
“That the fae would come for it?” Nick said.
“Exactly.”
“Now what?”
“You don’t want to report a dead body?” I asked, my smile impossible to hide. “You don’t want Tate to ream you out for the second time today?”
“You’re right about one thing,” Nick said. “If the SAPD has this, there’s a possibility, however small, that the fae will come for it.”
“And that’s a risk you don’t want to take.”
Nick shook his head. “How do we get this to the Far Realm?”
“He looks like he’s Spring Court. I’m going to contact the Spring Queen to see if it’s something she wants to deal with.” I rolled my eyes up and huffed a sigh.
“Great,” Nick said. “How do we get the body out of here?”
I squinted at it, realizing we had a major problem.
“Carry it?” I suggested. I looked at Nick, who held up his hands.
“Hey, I’ve been told to be hands off. I’m not even backup, remember?”
“Yeah, that was when you could’ve gotten into trouble,” I said. “Now you’re going to be in trouble if you don’t help me. Eventually somebody is going to come down here, and how are we going to explain a dead body? Tate is going to be pissed. He’ll probably send you to Fiji.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want that. All those beaches. All those half-naked men. All those drinks.”
“Come on. I know you have something up your sleeve, Nicholas King,” I said.
Nick rolled his eyes but pulled out his alchemy notepad. “This will help with the weight, but you’ll need to make sure no one notices us carrying out a large coffin.”
I clapped my hands together, rubbing them like I was some stage magician. Then, with a grin, I patted them down on the funeral shroud. The coffin disappeared.
Or rather, using the air and the light, I made it so people’s eyes would just glance off it. Nick frowned, looking down at where the coffin had been. Even as he looked, his eyes slid to me.
When he tried to refocus, his eyes slid to the door.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“There’s this weird effect,” I said. “If you get the right light, people have a hard time focusing on something. It’s like an invisible sun glare.
You know how you automatically wince away from sun bouncing off the windshield?
This is like that, but I’m doing the cheap version.
It won’t hold up that well under scrutiny. ”
“Well, then we’d better move,” Nick said. He drew three circles, powering up each as he went. Frowning down at where the coffin used to be, he gestured with the three slips of paper in his hand. “I need to see it.”
I brushed my hand across the coffin, and it became visible again. The light wasn’t happy, but I reassured it that it would only be a moment. When Nick placed the circles at the head, foot, and in the center of the coffin, the thing floated.
My eyebrows shot up, the expression exaggerated because of the glamour.
“You said it would be lighter, not that it would fly,” I said.
“I must have done the calculations wrong, or it’s a lot lighter than I assumed.”
Shrugging, I took hold of the front and gestured for Nick to take the back. Soothing the light back into its invisible glare, I tugged on the coffin. It came easily, like an obedient dog. I could just see myself walking it around the dog park, everyone staring as I paraded around a dead fae body.
With Nick behind me, we jammed the thing into the elevator, then took it to the lobby.
The security guards were even more shocked to see us come out.
They must’ve expected that we would disappear with Damon Griffith like the legends said.
One of them even rushed to the front door to hold it open for us.
Then we were outside, a dead body between us, as the realization that the coffin wouldn’t fit into my car struck both of us.