Chapter 4
Four
Normally, on a case like this, I would get inside the building by some extralegal means.
Pretending to be a cop worked sometimes, and other times I could convince whoever was working upfront to let me in by either slipping them a couple of twenties or using some magic on them.
With Nick at my side, I wasn’t enthusiastic about trying either of those options.
So, instead, we got a tour.
“Are you sure you’re okay walking?” the employee asked, breathing heavy.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re good walking.”
We’d waited until Damon left because I knew it would be suspicious if we went in immediately. Plus, if we’d gone in while he was still there, we couldn’t search the place.
So we were taking a walking tour of the facility. Luckily, it wasn’t so massive that it would be awkward to have the employee let us walk down every alley. She was still unhappy we’d been unwilling to ride in the golf cart the facility used for tours.
“I like to get my ten thousand steps in,” I’d said, a shit-eating grin on my face. “Gotta keep the goods.”
I let Nick do most of the talking, focusing on the crumbs I’d smashed onto Damon Griffith. I didn’t need a lot of them, just enough to hear their voices. Crumbs were like toddlers, young and only half-developed. They weren’t old enough to have an actual personality beyond excitement.
The first time I’d talked to crumbs, it had been an awkward realization. Did all food have a spirit if you got down deep enough, or was it just baked goods that had that essence—ahem—‘baked’ in by whoever had spent hours focused on the sole task of making bread or muffins?
Then I realized that I only heard voices when I pushed in enough magic to cause a hundred gingerbread men to jump up and say, “You can’t catch me, asshole!
” After that, the way I ethically ate anything was the same way I ethically ate meat.
Sure, at one point the burger I was chowing down on had been a cow, but at the point I was chewing it, it was food.
Plus, talking to most baked goods was like listening to a room full of Tickle Me Elmos. Lots of high-pitched screeching all jumbled together so that I could’t hear one clear word. Still, when the surrounding spirits were all concrete, metal, and scraggly weeds, the crumbs should stand out.
We passed a unit on the corner, and I paused, bending as though I needed to retie my shoelace.
Nick caught on, interrupting the employee’s pitch to ask about pricing and what we could and couldn’t store.
I was almost one hundred percent certain the storage employee thought we were serial killers looking for some unit to turn into a kill box.
Her eyes kept darting to me, then to Nick, then the security cameras as though she was already picturing how they would cut her episode of Dateline. Nick glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, but he kept her attention on him.
My attention was on the screeching on the ground in front of me.
It was like being surrounded by Teletubbies or some other character from a children’s TV show where the dialogue was high-pitched nonsense syllables strung together.
This was definitely where Damon Griffith had stopped his car, gotten out, bent down to unlock the unit, and dusted off those last remaining crumbs I had so helpfully smashed against his shirt.
Now, I just needed to get into the unit. What would make the employee immediately open the door she had just assured us only we would have keys to?
Something that was an emergency but not enough of an emergency that she needed to call the police or fire department. I weighed my options.
She’d been very clear that none of the units were monitored from the inside. The facility only had cameras on the exterior, which would show anyone who entered or exited. Whatever we did inside, she said, was our business. Totally not sketchy.
However, after some probing, she had said that they equipped each unit with an automatic sprinkler system. She assured us it had never accidentally gone off while the facility had employed her. Standing, I decided to break her streak.
Automatic systems have to be pretty simple.
They need to be sensitive enough that they can detect a fire even if they’re not being maintained consistently but sturdy enough that some idiot trying to shove a dining room table into a unit too small for it to be stored vertically couldn’t take out the sprinkler head and soak everything he owns.
I didn’t want to test the water in the lines since that would involve singing a song, and I didn’t want the employee to think I was crazier than she already thought I was. Abruptly, I patted my pocket, as though looking for my cell phone.
Pulling it out, I glanced at the blank screen. “I have to take this.”
Ambling a few steps away, I said, “Yeah, it’s me.”
Nick began peppering the employee with questions, and I reached out with my magic.
Beyond the roll-up door, dust covered the room.
Apparently, despite visiting often, Damon Griffith wasn’t bothering to clean.
Maybe he was only coming long enough to drop off new artifacts and curios and then leaving before anyone could get suspicious.
“Hey, you,” I murmured, waking the thick brown dust inside the unit. It was thickest on the ground, but I felt it on almost every surface. It was sluggish, as most dust was. There was a reason dust settled on things and only moved with a strong breeze or when a cloth picked it up.
The dust was curious, but communicating with it was like talking to someone who was half a bottle of Jack into their evening. It might focus on me for a second, but its attention would inevitably slide away.
“You know, I think a storm is coming.” The dust seemed puzzled by my statement, unsure what to do with the information about its own impending movement. “Yeah. In fact, I think it might be a little dust devil.”
Dust devil is a misnomer. What they pick up isn’t what settles on your shelves only to be revealed when your mom wipes a finger in front of your row of action figures. Dust devils pick up dirt, that fine gritty soil that gets into everything.
Now the dust was even more interested, though. It had never seen a dust devil, but the name was intriguing. It wanted to know more.
“Yeah,” I murmured. “In fact, I can feel it lifting you like a whirlwind. Like a tornado. You’re going up. Just like Dorothy, you’re going to end up in Oz.”
This confused the dust, who hadn’t been subjected to a foster mother in love with Judy Garland.
I changed tacks. “Can you feel yourself going up? Rising through the air in a circle? Wow, I don’t think you’ve ever flown, have you?
When you landed where you are, you just kind of fell, didn’t you? Is flying fun?”
There was a slight sound from inside the unit, the scrape of something against the metal door, a dust devil forming without wind yet somehow still existing.
“Oh, wow! You’re all the way to the ceiling. You’re dragging across all those metal pipes,” I said.
And there it was. What was going to get us into the storage unit, or at least get us a good look at it.
The dust clogged the fire alarm, and the thing couldn’t tell the difference between dust particles and smoke particles. A siren sounded, screaming like we’d experienced a nuclear blast. Water streamed out from under the door of the unit.
“What the—” the employee said.
“Is it supposed to do that?” Nick asked.
The employee ignored him, struggling with the lock at the bottom of the door.
I figured a facility as sketchy as this one hadn’t trained her on what to do in case of an emergency.
She didn’t know that you left the unit closed because even if she didn’t see or smell a fire, there could be one inside.
She slammed the door up, and a few inches of water tumbled out into the alley between the storage units. The employee swore, dancing through the water, trying not to get wet. “I’ll be right back.”
Disappearing at a run, she headed back to the office.
As soon as she left, I craned my neck to get a better view inside the unit.
“Parker…” Nick said.
“Hey, if it’s in plain view, is admissible in court,” I said. “Right?”
Nick’s lips became a thin line, and he exhaled through his nose but nodded. I moved closer to the doorway.
I’d expected only a few things to have the syrupy sweet feeling of the fae’s Far Realm. Instead, the entire unit felt like opening a door into the Far Realm. Everything from a handmade table to the knickknacks strewn across it felt fae.
Nick grabbed at my arm, but I shook him off, taking long strides into the unit.
It was dim inside, and the sprinkler system was still raining down water, soaking me to the bone. After a moment, my eyes adjusted, and I picked up one of the curios from a long folding table in the back. It was a small gemstone, about the size of my thumbnail, set into a necklace made of gold.
From what I could tell, it looked like it was from the Autumn Court. Whatever its provenance, it was fae.
Beside me, Nick said, “Is that safe to touch?”
It was a fair question. Fae artifacts were notoriously finicky, just as likely to turn someone into a goat as they were to bring any luck. Closing my eyes, I reached out with my senses.
The sprinkler system had petered off, small glugs of water still coming from the sprinkler head. If I pushed magic into everything, I would wake it all at once. That seemed like a dangerous plan, but I didn’t have time to go through each artifact one by one.
We had only a couple of minutes before the storage unit employee returned, and at that point she’d have called her boss or the cops. In other words, we were working on borrowed time. I did my best work on borrowed time.
I pushed a soft layer of magic through the unit, waking everything that I could wake and tasting the things I couldn’t.