“No, I’ve started scheduling around your repeated tardiness,” Ms. B said, the reprimand in her voice again. “You have a visitor who doesn’t seem to think I noticed she entered.” Now the little brownie sounded insulted.
I frowned but nodded, heading for my office. PC tried to entice another treat from the brownie, but when she shooed him away, he trotted after me.
I felt the varied and deadly collection of Briar’s arsenal of spells before I even reached the door. She wasn’t wearing that impressive magic-cloaking spell, though she did have a look-away spell active, as well as a sound-dampening charm. She was hiding, just not from me. Or maybe she kept those charms active by habit.
Briar was sitting at my desk when I entered, her dark braid falling over one shoulder as she rummaged through the contents of my desk drawer. I frowned at her.
“Do you have a search warrant?”
She smiled as she looked up, a big, predatory smile, like a hunting cat. “Just looking for a pen while I waited for you.”
I stepped up to the desk and pushed the small cylinder holding both pens and pencils toward her. She made an ah sound, as if she hadn’t noticed them before. I wasn’t fooled.
“What are you doing here, Briar? You insulted my office manager by trying to sneak in.”
“The little creature in the front lobby?”
“Her name is Ms. B, and she’s a brownie.” Which most humans had never seen before. She scared some clients with her diminutive stature and noseless features, but she was good folk and my friend, and I didn’t take kindly to people calling her a creature.
The thoughts must have been clear on my face because Briar’s false smile faded, her expression becoming serious. “‘Ms. B.’ I’ll remember that. I’d apologize, but . . .” She held out her hands, palms up, and I knew what she meant. Ms. B was fae, and you don’t apologize to fae unless you want to end up in their debt. “I didn’t actually come here to harass you.”
“Good, because I have a client interview scheduled for this morning, so if you could . . .” I motioned to the door.
Briar leaned back in my chair, tucking her hands behind her head. “I said I wasn’t here to harass you, not that I was leaving.”
The chime of the bells on the main door sounded. My clients, no doubt.
“Out,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“I apparently showed up to town too early,” she said, not only not leaving, but kicking her motorcycle-boot-clad feet onto the surface of my desk. “Fast-rotting corpses are interesting, but a relic thief who died while the crime was in progress isn’t exactly the kind of case I tend to get called in on. The precogs have no more clues for me yet, so I just have to cool my heels. I’m not good at that. But you seem to attract the scary and strange like it’s a hobby, so I figure I’ll stick close to you, at least until something more interesting arises.”
Outside my open office door, I could hear Ms. B talking to someone. “Out,” I said again. “My clients have a right to privacy.”
“You’re a magic-eye, not a doctor.” “Magic-eye” was an insulting term for a private investigator who used magic and no real investigative work to solve cases, and based on the way her eyes twinkled as she said it, she meant it as the insult it was. “No one will even know I’m here, unless you make a big fuss.”
That at least was true. Unless my client was a sensitive.
Footsteps sounded in the hall. Since the door was open, Ms. B knocked on the frame.
“Your scheduled appointment is here,” she said, her tone making it clear that Briar was not on her schedule.
Briar dutifully dropped her legs and vacated my chair, but she didn’t leave the room. Instead she moved to the corner and leaned against the far wall. There wasn’t much I could do. Even if I called the cops, she outranked most of the locals in her role as an investigator for the Magical Crimes Investigation Bureau—I’d learned that the last time she’d been in town.
So I chose to ignore her presence and hoped she’d keep her word about my clients not knowing she was present. Walking around my desk, I sat down and pulled my laptop out of my bag, setting it up before turning and nodding at Ms. B.
“Show them in.”
• • •
I pushed the box of tissues across my desk, closer to the clients sitting in the chairs in front of me. Rachael Saunders immediately grabbed two, dabbing them at her nose. Her husband, Rue Saunders, stared down at his hands. He’d done that since he’d sat down, letting his wife tell their sob-broken story of loss.
“Katie was only six,” she said, grabbing a third tissue. “She was planned. Wished for. We were older already when she was born.”
I nodded in what I hoped was a sympathetic manner. This story had been convoluted at best, and all I’d gathered so far was that they’d lost their daughter to a blood illness. Some days I wished I had time to take a couple of courses on grief counseling because while I was excellent when it came to speaking to the dead, I found it a lot harder to handle the bereaved families. Shades were just memories animated with magic. With the living I had to worry about offending, and I had to navigate a business contract while they were focused on lost loved ones. It didn’t help that I couldn’t utter the simple words “I’m sorry for your loss.” My recently awakened fae nature wouldn’t allow me to express even insincere condolences without creating a debt that could be called in.
When Rachael paused for a particularly jagged breath, I seized my chance to interrupt her story.
“Katie was very young,” I said. “What are you hoping to learn from speaking to her shade?”
Rue looked up for the first time. His eyes were dry, hard, but bloodshot and tired. “‘Her shade’? We have no interest in her shade, Miss Craft. We want you to find her ghost.”
“I don’t—” I started.
His wife interrupted me. “We saw you on TV, last summer. With the ghost. You can talk to ghosts.”
Well. Crap.
“I can speak to ghosts,” I said, nodding slowly and trying to keep them focused on my face as I discreetly pressed a button on my office phone. Nothing overt happened, but it would cause a light to flash on the phone at the front desk, and with luck, Ms. B would interrupt in a moment with an excuse to end this consultation early. It was a signal we’d worked out back when the firm had been inundated with unreasonable requests leading up to Halloween. Opening my palms in front of me and offering the grieving couple my most placating smile, I said, “But ghosts are very rare. Most souls move on immediately following death. It is very unlikely your daughter’s ghost remained.”
“She was a very good girl, Miss Craft. She wouldn’t have passed on. She would have waited,” Rachael said, her glassy eyes pleading for it to be true.
I glanced at the photo of a pretty young girl with sun-kissed cheeks and ringlets pulled back from her face with blue bows. She looked small for her age, frail from the disease that had claimed her life. I couldn’t imagine her putting up the frantic fight that would have caused a soul collector to release her into the purgatory of the land of the dead. And if Rachael’s description of her being a good girl was accurate, she probably wouldn’t have fought the collector in the first place, going peacefully from here to wherever souls went next. But I couldn’t say that. It fell into the category of sharing secrets about the soul collectors, which was rather frowned upon, and since I was sort of dating one, I tried not to do anything that would get him into trouble. You know, more than his forbidden relationship with me would cause.
“I don’t think there is anything I can do for you.”
“We need to find her,” Rue said, pushing to his feet. He pressed both hands flat on my desk, leaning forward.
He was a big man, over forty but still in decent shape based on the muscle tone his suit hinted at. Grief had pulled at the skin around his eyes and his mouth, and his hair was slightly unkempt, like he normally kept it cut short but had forgotten to see a barber in a while. Magic buzzed around him. Nothing active, or even focused. He had some charms in his pocket, too weak while inactive for me to pinpoint what they did. Raw magic filled rings on each of his pointer fingers, and more raw magic waited in what I guessed was a pendant around his neck.