“Scary thought,” Joe muttered following her back into the store.
“We’re less scary when we’re young.”
“Differently scary.”
“Fair enough. Auntie Jane says Gran was deadly with a field hockey stick.”
“Actually deadly?”
“It’s always safer not to make assumptions.” She slipped back behind the counter. “No customers while we were gone. No surprise.” Although the traffic along 9th Avenue was steady, the sidewalks were empty.
“I should go.” Joe headed for the door. “Your grandmother didn’t like me hanging around all day.”
“Gran’s not here.” When Joe turned to check the shadows, Allie managed to keep her eyes locked on him rather than join in the search. Just managed. “Listen, if you could stay just a little longer, I could get started checking this place for…” She examined and discarded a couple of descriptive phrases that would have gotten her mouth washed out with soap at a much younger age. “… less than normal merchandise.”
“Like the monkey’s paw?”
“Hopefully not.”
“There’s that velvet Elvis.” He nodded toward the box.
“I saw.”
“It’s like its eyes follow you.”
“Optical illusion.”
“If you say so. The thing creeps me the fuck out.”
“Okay, that’s…” Her phone rang before she could finish.
“Your mother says Catherine’s crucial business is a junk shop,” Auntie Jane announced without preamble.
“That’s right, but…”
“Ha!” she said, and hung up.
“Auntie Jane.” Allie slipped her phone back into her pocket. “Long-distance mocking.” His shrug suggested he didn’t care. “So, are you staying? I’ll throw in lunch.”
“Lunch?”
“The meal in the middle of the day. I’m a good cook. I was thinking grilled cheese sandwiches, a bowl of homemade tomato soup…” Gran may have gone wild, but she was still a Gale. The pantry was full of canning. “… and pie.”
He rolled his eyes. “Grilled cheese sandwiches aren’t exactly hard to cook.”
“You don’t have to stay.” She tried to sound like she didn’t care either way and suspected she’d failed dismally. Joe wasn’t just a connection to her missing grandmother, he was the only person she knew in Calgary.
“What kind of pie?”
“I don’t know yet.” She pulled another bill out of the cashbox. “We can start with more coffee.”
“I’m not staying all day, mind. I’ve got things to do.”
“Okay.”
Joe tugged the bill from her hand. “You want another muffin with that?”
The charms the old woman had put on the windows were still in effect. He could see the reflection of the street-traffic passing, the storefront directly opposite, himself in ballcap and dark glasses struggling to get a paper from the box—but nothing past the glass. His employer hadn’t liked that Joe O’Hallan had been hanging around the old woman, his concern only slightly tempered by the evidence that Catherine Gale had barely tolerated the changeling. He really wouldn’t appreciate him striking up a friendship with this new Gale and, unless Joe had snuck out the back way, he’d been in there for hours.
He’d trailed Joe for three days back after he’d first shown up, his employer suspicious of anything that might interfere with him building a power base in the city. There was a danger inherent in tracking purebloods—some of them literally had eyes in the backs of their heads, and they very much disliked interference in their business. Where disliked meant if caught, expect to be ripped limb from limb. Leprechauns like the changeling were not only nasty little sons of bitches, but they’d taken to Human weapons like cops took to Timmy’s. They might throw a curse of seven years of bad luck but were just as likely to pull a submachine gun from a convenient pocket universe and use the spray of bullets like a scythe, cutting anyone they’d caught trailing them off at the ankles, leaving them to flop around in shock, and eventually bleed to death. He figured all that attitude had something to do with them being the shortest out of the box.
The trick was not to get caught.
He was very good at what he did.
This changeling, though, except for pulling the old fairy gold scam, he appeared to be living Human. And living rough. Not only had trading lumps of what looked to be raw gold for cash gotten more complicated since the old days, but the cash it brought didn’t go far. If the glyphs on his scope hadn’t allowed him to see what his target truly was, he’d have dismissed him as a mutt dumped to fend for himself. His report on Joe’s pathetic existence had been enough to tag him no threat.
In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.
The Courts had to know what was going down by now. No way movement of that magnitude hadn’t been flagged. Generally, they didn’t give a crap about what happened in the MidRealm, but Joe was still of the blood, no matter how long he’d been gone, and damned near living on top of the epicenter. It was possible, however unlikely, they’d warned him.
It was possible Joe had taken that information straight to the new owner of the shop.
It would certainly explain why he’d been in there for so long.
He rattled the door of the newspaper box one last time—as an excuse to linger the damned things were near foolproof—gathered up his Herald, checked the sky, and headed west. His orders had been to find out what Alysha Gale knew, but he couldn’t do that as long as the changeling was with her. Joe was as suspicious as all hell just generally. In case the Courts hadn’t been in contact, the last thing he wanted to do was give him a reason to call home.
If it turned out Joe had told the Gale woman nothing of note, he wondered how they were going to keep it that way. The Courts were possessive of their own; taking out a pureblood would attract more unwanted attention from yet another source.
His right index finger squeezed the memory of a trigger. It was always harder when they looked Human.
The pie was rhubarb—not terribly surprising given the season. Joe devoured a second piece in spite of the two sandwiches and the large bowl of soup that came before it. They ate in the store, sitting on a pair of stools behind the counter, Allie flipping through her gran’s recipe book, wiping grease off her fingers to mark the entries that referred to the bottles in the cabinet.
All the Gale girls dabbled—there’d never been a school dance where one of them hadn’t spiked the punch—but this was on another scale entirely. Allie had a feeling it might be smartest to trade Gran’s recipes to one of the aunties for services rendered rather than risk the kind of disaster that had made her junior prom an object lesson in winging it.
“Joe, when do you start fading again?”
“Four weeks last Monday. Who wants to know?”
She tapped the page in front of her. “The person who’ll keep it from happening.”
“You?”
“What? You thought Gran was coming back from the grave to mix drinks? Metaphorically speaking, since there isn’t a grave or a body to put in one.”
He sighed and slid off the stool onto his feet. “Look, I did some stuff for her, but she didn’t even like me much, okay? So if you’re being nice to me because you think she was my friend, I should just go.”
“You should just sit.”
Looking a little surprised, he sat. The food as much as the potion had firmed up his edges. Remembering how he’d looked through the door, Allie came to a decision.
“Do you want a job?”
“What?”
“I need to find out what my grandmother is up to. That’s why I came here. If there’s a clue in the store, I’m going to have to weed through everything to try and find it. I can’t do that and deal with customers.”
“Customers?”
“We must have them,” Allie told him dryly. “Someone has to be buying all the yoyos.”
“Why don’t you just close the store while you search?”
“Because Gran left it to me to run.”
“But if it’s yours…”
“Is it?”