I walked out onto the balcony and looked at the city street below. Cars zipped past, leaving trails of light in the darkness. In my hand the cell phone chirped again. Three voice mail messages. Tradition said I should throw the phone off the balcony and let gravity do the heavy lifting, but my heart and my hands said different. I couldn’t call, ever. But I could keep the phone and listen to his voice, and have a tiny part of him. Ari and Grimm and the rest of the world would never know. So I went back inside and slipped the phone into my purse. Bruises on my arm where the goblin had grabbed sent tremors of pain through me every time I moved, but didn’t compare to the bruises on my heart I’d put there myself. The hours rolled away while I lay on the bed, aching my way through to dawn.
Seven
IT WAS TIME to go to work, but I couldn’t risk meeting Ari, so I went in through the service entrance. Evangeline waited in the back room, going over papers, and she came over and gave me a hug. “Heard about last night. You’ll get used to it eventually.”
“I messed up. I got too close.”
She poured me a cup of coffee. “Do this long enough and it won’t be the last time you screw up.” I didn’t intend to be doing it that long. Then again, neither had she.
Rosa came in. She’d been the receptionist longer than I’d worked there. I figured she came with the building. “Evie, your client is out front.”
Evangeline left to get ready for a day’s work. Probably Ari. Probably about Liam. I tapped on the mirror. “Grimm, what do you got for me? Troll? Maybe a few elves in a shoe factory?”
He answered from the mirror down the back hall. “My dear, I was thinking that perhaps you might want to do inventory on the storage room. The lost-and-found pile has started moving on its own, and something ate everything in the office fridge last night, containers and all.”
I sat up, cold shivers running down my back. “Including the cheese wheel?”
“Marissa, don’t be ridiculous.”
It figured. There was a running debate—one might say legend—among Grimm’s hourly workers over how the cheese wheel actually came to be in the fridge in the first place. One rumor was that it was whole milk when it was first put in, and had solidified through the years, exposed to Grimm’s magic. Another said one of Grimm’s previous agents was a vampire, and that when she was breastfeeding she accidentally left milk in the fridge and it corrupted an entire wheel. Another said it was a normal block of cheddar. There was a reason the store owners always sliced cheese wheels into little pieces. Cheddar could be evil. Truth was, the wheel had shown up in the fridge the morning after my first “Welcome to the Agency” party, in a box with my name on it.
Every intern I’d seen attempt to remove it died horrible, bloody deaths within days. Six interns came and went. The cheese remained. Grimm was taking it easy on me, the bastard. “You don’t have anything more interesting? No shoplifting? No blackmail gathering? Hey, isn’t today wolf-day?”
“Wolves have never been your style, my dear.” Three weeks ago he’d complained that I never wanted to ride shotgun on visits to the wolves.
“Yeah, they’re Evangeline’s, and she’s cleaning up my mess.” I opened my bottom drawer and took out my box of special ammo, labeled by problem creature. Genie, imp, cheerleader—there it was: wolves. “Either you let me ride shotgun, or I’m taking on the cheese. Assuming I don’t leave in a body bag, it’s leaving in a garbage bag. Either way, one of us is going.”
Grimm squinted at me for a moment and shook his head. “Oh, all right. The van leaves in twenty minutes. If you aren’t armed and on board I won’t have them wait.”
A visit to the wolves was exactly what I needed to cheer me up. A quick stop off at wardrobe and I’d be ready.
In the loading bay on the bottom floor they brought in the pigs. Not magic pigs. Normal porkers, and pigs stank. We’d load them into the trailer, hook the trailer to the van, and drive all the way into the country to make a deal.
Billy checked the tires on the van. He was a rotund man with a belly like he was carrying triplets and more chins than Chinatown. I knew from experience he was cold and calm under fire. Billy was the driver on wolf runs most days, and he was the negotiator all days. “Miss Locks, you’d best change before we head off.”
“Not gonna happen, Billy. Think it’ll get their attention?”
He shrugged. As a teamster, Billy got double time for doing work with the wolves, so it didn’t matter to him how things went down. “Think it’ll get you killed, Miss Locks. He know?”
“He knows everything,” I said, though I knew that wasn’t exactly true. “Not like negotiations don’t wind up messy anyway.” So we got in the van and he put it in gear. We drove out to a place only marginally better than Inferno: Jersey. Billy in his ball cap and me in a red sweatsuit with (of course) a hood.
Time was we’d have gone in guns blazing, but Grimm insisted on talk first, bullets later. That was a sign of his genius, in my opinion. It was damn hard to kill a werewolf, but it was easy to bargain with one if you had the right goods.
“Where’s Evie?” Billy asked as we drove along the countryside. “She normally makes the dog run.”
“Evangeline is busy,” I said, not wanting to mention what she was busy with.
We rode in silence to the edge of a village. Smokehouses dotted the landscape here, wood smoke rising up through the air, and everywhere was the smell of bacon and ham. The wolf guard met us by the road. I only saw him, but there were doubtless half a dozen others.
“Afternoon,” said Billy. “Just here to barter a bit.” He gave the brakes a pump, which sent the pigs squealing.
The effect on the guard was immediate. He sniffed the air and his mouth hung slack. “She ain’t the usual one.” He bared his teeth at me. If you were a person, or a wolf in human form, baring your teeth didn’t actually serve to intimidate. In fact, I felt a curious urge to tell him my dentist could lighten his teeth by at least three shades.
“Get on in,” said the guard.
The wolf town looked like old Amish meets trailer park. Shoebox white houses made of rickety wood and low cinderblock barns perfect for keeping pigs, kids, or both. The only real giveaway was that every house had a dog door big enough for a Saint Bernard to fit through. The village was run-down, stank of butcher blood, and was filled with ravenous creatures that would rip your throat out for a snack. All of that I could deal with. The thing that made it truly abysmal was that it was in New Jersey.
We pulled ahead to the village square, where Billy made turning a trailer around look easy. Evangeline told me that once (and only once) he’d left the van parked in the wrong direction, and nearly didn’t get out.
The wolves came out in force, and not all of them were fully human. Hell, given where we were, it was possible some of them couldn’t even turn fully human.
Billy got out like he was going to the feed store. He slapped the hood. “Stay with the van. Be ready.” He walked across the square into a building that looked like a bar combined with a dress consignment shop.
Where would they be? I wondered, looking at the cinderblock barns that lined the square. Like I said, used to be we would go in shooting, but the results were messy.
See, wolves had a nasty habit of collecting kids. Stupid kids, slow kids, confused kids, kids who made bad decisions. Most weeks we could bargain for them. It was the power of bacon, which was also near magical. Some weeks the wolves were extra hungry, or had extra kids, and we did extended negotiations, the kind with bullets or buckshot. I actually hoped for those.