Charlie didn’t have her phone; she’d have thirty-two hours and twenty minutes of peace and quiet. “You haven’t called the aunties yet, have you?”
“Figured you should get a heads up first.”
“You’re too good to me.”
“I know it.”
“Charlie…”
Charlie’s interruption was more of a snort than a snicker. “I’ll be careful if you keep from doing anything stupid.”
“Define stupid?”
“Bite me.”
“Love you, too.”
She pressed a kiss to the phone before she closed it and turned back to Graham. His brows rose, and questions about why he suddenly couldn’t understand a word she’d said swam just under the surface of his expression. “Problem?”
“Unexpected travel screwup.” She still needed to know what he knew, but she really didn’t need the distraction of his eyes and his scent and his smile and his hands and all the lovely that cheap suit was covering while dealing with the inevitable calls from the aunties.
“Family member?”
Interesting phrasing.
“Cousin.”
“In Brazil?”
“Yes.” But that much he’d overheard. “She’s a musician.”
“I should go.” He didn’t want to, and he wasn’t bothering to hide it. Easy enough to see that his desire to stay mostly had to do with wanting confirmation of whatever he thought was going on. With the store. With her grandmother. With a cousin in Brazil. She could almost see him drawing lines, connecting dots he thought he had. But that wasn’t the part he let her see; she took a look at that all on her own. The part he let her see had more to do with her, personally, and she really wished she had the time to appreciate the sentiment.
“Yeah, you should go.” Her fingers tightened around the phone. “It’s going to get very… family around here soon.”
Graham smiled at that, like he understood what she meant. He really didn’t. He really couldn’t, but she appreciated the thought and caught herself wondering about his family as he said, “I’d like to see you again. To talk about the store. For my article.”
Nice save. She wondered why he felt he had to make it. He wasn’t wearing a ring, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a significant other attached. “How about coffee tomorrow?”
“Coffee’s good.”
“I’ll see you around eleven, then.”
“Great.”
Graham hadn’t expected to have quite so visceral a reaction to Alysha Gale. He stepped wide off the curb avoiding a puddle, ignored the shouted, Watch where the fuck you’re going! from a passing truck, tried to stop thinking of her as everything he’d ever looked for in a woman—news to him he’d been looking—and tried to start thinking.
He could do this. He could do his job and keep it from getting personal.
If his watch was right, and the cheap piece of shit hadn’t been ruined in the rain, it was only a little better than seventeen hours until he could talk to her again.
Lying flat on the roof, holding a directional microphone instead of his rifle, he watched Alysha Gale walk down 9th to the twenty-four hour convenience store at 11th Street. She’d headed out to shop almost immediately after she’d closed the store and received two phone calls on the way down the street—two liters of milk, a pound of butter, a dozen eggs, and three lemons—three calls on the way back. This particular microphone could pick up fly farts at three kilometers, but he had no doubt she could block it if she cared to.
Strangely, she didn’t care to.
“I’m fine. Everything’s fine. You know as much as I do. No, no sign of her. I’d rather you didn’t, I can manage.”
And around again. And again. Her end of the conversation barely changed there and back.
Maybe her lack of concern for eavesdroppers wasn’t that strange after all.
The sound cut off when she reentered the store; before she’d disappeared, the old woman had put security in place even his boss couldn’t crack. The boss had upped his own security the moment Catherine Gale showed up on the radar. Given the security he’d already put in place, that was saying something.
“She obviously doesn’t know I’m here, and I’m fucking well going to keep it that way.”
Given what he’d been told about the Gales, the youth of this newest family member to show up in the city had come as a bit of a surprise. Gale females of any age had the potential to be dangerous adversaries, but in the older women, all that potential had been realized and they were apparently borderline bugfuck besides. Was the girl a trap? Was her function to lull them into a false sense of security? Distract them while the others gathered?
He could wait here and hope she left the building again, or he could be more productive and have a few words with the changeling.
Six aunties, her mother, Charlie’s mother, and two of Charlie’s sisters later, Allie got the one call she wasn’t expecting.
“Do I need to come out there?”
“David?”
“I’ll be finished with the job I’m doing currently in seventy-two hours, but I can be there in forty-eight if you need me.”
Phone trapped between ear and shoulder, Allie broke the third and final egg onto the third and final cup of flour. “To do what?”
“Mom says you’re in trouble.”
“Me? Charlie’s the one who got bounced.”
“Four times. Trying to get to you.”
“It didn’t matter where she was going.”
“But she said it had to do with you.”
“Nothing’s happening here.” As the ancient, upright mixer struggled to fold air into the thick batter, she glanced over at the window, opened her mouth to tell David about the shadow, and closed it again. She didn’t need to bring big brother all the way to Calgary to chase shadows. “There’s no sign of Gran, and I hired a leprechaun to work in the store.”
“A leprechaun?”
“Yeah.”
“Full-blood?”
“Changeling.”
“The family doesn’t mess with the Fey, Allie.”
“I’m not messing with him.” Hadn’t even occurred to her actually, and that was a bit weird; he was cute in a scruffy sort of way. “He needed a job and, if I’m going to figure out what’s going on, I needed part-time help.”
“So you hired a leprechaun?”
“Let it go, David.”
“What’s a leprechaun doing in Calgary anyway?”
“He tells me that things are happening here.” She hadn’t been able to find a tube pan, but a bundt pan would do.
“I’ll be there in forty-eight hours.”
“Not those kind of things.”
“You sure?”
And she convinced him that she was. For all his power, David was still a Gale boy, and they took Gale girls at face value. It was safer that way.
The traditional way to catch leprechauns was to sneak up behind them while they worked on their shoes. Count on them being particularly obsessed if they’re whistling. People in his line of work who relied on folklore rather than more mundane skills tended to die young. Or wish they had.
He stared at Joe through the night vision goggles—the changeling had one foot up on the park bench, tunelessly whistling “Mime Abduction” as he struggled with a knot in one bootlace—thought about irony, and hit him with the Taser. The current theory among those in the know was that, as well as overwhelming the nervous system and causing temporary paralysis, a Taser could be used to disrupt the more exotic abilities of the Fey. He hadn’t actually seen Joe use any of those exotic abilities, but the redundantly careful lived longer.
Cable ties were in place around grimy wrists before the paralysis wore off, even given the Fey’s accelerated recovery time. Under the baggy clothes, the boy—Not a boy, he reminded himself—was surprisingly thin. Maybe he’d swapped bulk for height. Didn’t matter. Facedown on the asphalt path, hands secured in the small of his back, a knee between his shoulder blades and the end of the silencer tucked under one pointed ear, Joe O’Hallan wasn’t going anywhere.