I’d have been upset, but I’d gotten used to how royalty spoke and acted. The princes and princesses were a bunch of worthless brats, but I kept my tongue in check around their parents. As we moved across the building, a man followed. I had thought him an assistant, but he was too wide, too heavy. Bodyguard or personal assassin.
“Pawn, that’s Shigeru. You needn’t fear him.”
Shigeru bowed to me, and I returned it, hoping I remembered the correct angle and length for an honorary bow.
“Don’t be afraid, girl, he’s not magical, he’s Asian.” I had two Korean girls in my class at community college, and I knew Asian magic—it was hard work and high expectations. The tattoo on his arm matched that of the ninja assassins Grimm occasionally hired for government work. That meant Shigeru wasn’t dangerous. He was deadly.
“You are late,” said Queen Mihail, taking a seat on a couch edge by a window. “Sit.”
Now, I wasn’t afraid of heights. It doesn’t pay to be—too many ledges, ladders, and crevices—but sitting on the edge of the couch I could look down the building. The farther down I looked, the more dizzy I got. “I’m sorry I’m late. I couldn’t figure out how to call the elevator.” I actually thought I was fifteen minutes early. Grimm has this theory that me showing up early was actually a harbinger of the apocalypse. If he was right, every time I showed up late, I actually saved the world. You’d think he would thank me for it.
“My elevator isn’t called. It’s sent. I told it to pick up the head of the investigation and only the head of the investigation. I called Fairy Godfather five minutes ago, and you just showed up.”
Something was wrong. I’d accidentally stepped into a mystery, and all I had to go on were Saturday morning cartoons with a talking dog and monsters in masks. Something had gone wrong in the time it had taken me to bus through Kingdom and get here, and I was going to be damned if I let her throw me off. I’d look like an idiot. I’d make Grimm look like an idiot.
“Show me where it happened,” I said, taking a stab at it. She rose and I followed her up a sweeping staircase to another floor. She placed her hand on the door. It glowed for a moment, and opened. Huge, messy but recognizable: I stood in the middle of a bachelor pad. Mihail’s apartment.
My bracelet tingled against my arm. That meant they had enough Glitter to put cancellation wards over the whole top floors. Grimm wasn’t going to be watching over my shoulder. “I need to look around,” I said. Then, drawing on many Saturday mornings’ worth of TV, I added, “We need to search for clues.” Only problem was, I was an agent, not a private investigator. In Kingdom, if you tried pulling the mask of a monster, it would probably pull the skin off your head.
“Shigeru will watch you. Don’t try to take anything.” She left us alone.
“You are not an investigator.” He came over and stood behind me.
“No. I’m the messenger girl, errand girl, that sort of thing. I was supposed to be filling in a questionnaire about the prince’s magical tolerances. We had a basic love potion fail on him.”
“You assume the prince is capable of love. May I have your gun for safekeeping?” I hadn’t put a hand on my purse or looked at it once, but he knew. “It would make me less, how to say? Tense.”
It wasn’t like shooting him was an option anyway, so I took it out, pulled the clip, and handed it to him.
“Thank you.” He tucked it into a deep pocket in his loose black pants. “I assist the royal family in all positions, so I will answer your questions.”
“Is there someplace we can sit? Trust me, I’m not going to take anything he’s touched.”
I think a smile almost made it out, but he stifled it. “You have met the prince.”
“Yeah. We’ve talked more than I’d like.” I was actually glad I had met Liam instead. Three dates with Mihail would have triggered my gag reflex. His apartment was actually decorated with paintings: paintings of himself.
“Look, when I get back, Grimm’s gonna want to know what happened, and I don’t want to look bad. I’m a messenger, but even a messenger wants to do good by their boss. What’d she call Fairy Godfather about?”
Shigeru leaned back and blinked, his eyes getting wider. “The prince, Mihail. He is missing. Kidnapped.”
That did it. I took pride in knowing when to call for help, and when to handle things myself. “You get bracelet reception anywhere in here?”
“That corner. Wards are weakest there. You’re above most of the normal interference, anyway.”
I wandered to the corner, stepping over discarded laundry and avoiding anything that had so much as touched the prince. The moment I hit the corner my bracelet shook like it was going to tear my arm off. The wall was all glass and the view made me want to hurl, so I took out the compact and focused on the tiny mirror.
“Grimm?” When I saw him I knew things were bad.
“Marissa, where are you?”
“Mihail’s apartment. Don’t worry. I showed up and the queen figured I was here to look into it. I need an investigator and the cops. This isn’t my area of expertise, Grimm.”
“There’s a secondary team on their way already and I’ve contacted the police, as they should have to begin with. Simply tell the queen you don’t believe her son’s case is getting enough attention, and you’ve dispatched a squad to handle it.”
“I dispatched them?”
“Let her believe what she wants to.”
I heard Evangeline’s voice, distant and broken. “Let. Me. Talk to her.”
“Not now,” said Grimm, but I could feel her reaching through him.
I had this horrible feeling in my stomach and needed to lean against the window. “What’s wrong?”
“We’ll discuss it when you return,” said Grimm.
I felt Evangeline reaching out again. “Tell her.”
Grimm dropped his eyes. “There’s been an accident at Liam’s house.”
“Show her,” said Evangeline.
Grimm didn’t usually connect us like that, and while his magic reached into our ears he almost never did anything with our other senses. “You need to trust your own eyes,” he always said, but I felt my vision slipping away. I stood, too tall, and at the wrong angles. I was looking through Evangeline’s eyes. It had been a house, or a barn, or a house with a workshop, I don’t know. Everything left was charred chunks of wood and twisted bits of wrought iron.
Evangeline strode across the charred ground, each step so foreign I was sure she’d fall over. She reached down and shook the ashes from something. A silver snake—the curse shell. Its eyes were lifeless; it rattled and clinked as she picked it up. Grimm cut the link to Evangeline and I sagged against the window.
“He’s not dead, I already checked,” said Grimm. “I can’t seem to find him.”
“I gotta go.” I snapped the compact closed. My gaze wandered out over the city and the world spun, slick with tears and fear and pain. Hands seized me and led me from the window, and I was unwilling to resist.
“Sit,” said Shigeru, and I collapsed onto a couch by a king-sized bed. “Bad news.” He sat on the edge of the bed.
I nodded. I struggled to find my voice, to focus on my job. “Team of investigators coming. Cops too. Some of them are friends, sort of.”
“I will restrain myself. I do not believe you will take anything. When you are ready, the doors beside the elevator lead down.” He put his hand on my shoulder as he spoke. “Bad news and good news are brothers. Where one is, the other is never far behind.”
My eyes ached, my head pounded, and I blew my nose on a tissue and tossed it in the trash by the bed. That’s when the dressing mirror caught my eye.
It was long and narrow and ugly, obviously a family relic from a time when fine copper mirrors couldn’t be had. The thing was a silver mirror, the old kind, with a silver platter painted and polished until it held a dim reflection. The polish had long since worn off it and the silvering looked like sludge that had run down the mirror, leaving lumps. What bugged me was the feeling I got when I looked at it. It’s the same feeling I got when Grimm watched during an assignment. For a moment, the desire to touch it seized me. The thought of Mihail’s hand doing the same washed over me like cold water, and the moment was gone.