“You ready to hurl lightning?” I asked.
She gave me a frustrated glance. “I don’t understand all the words, and I can’t do what little I understand. ‘Gather thyne energy.’ Okay, that’s no big deal, but ‘send it out along a spindle drop,’ that’s barely English, let alone understandable.”
I shrugged. “You’re doing better than I would. I’ve got zero magic talent. I can’t even draw a protection sigil. Thank Kingdom I can draw a gun.”
“After yesterday, I feel like an honorary agent.” She gave me a little grin, like a child who’d discovered a new toy.
Right about then, it occurred to me how stupid my plan was. One day of firearms training barely taught Ari how to avoid shooting herself. One class of self-defense probably made her more dangerous to herself than anyone attacking her. And now she had this idea that being an agent was good. It made me sick to my stomach.
“It’s no honor. Anyway, Grimm’s got a strict ‘No Princesses’ rule for his agents. Some sort of human resources violation. I don’t think I’m even an agent anymore. I got demoted to handmaiden.”
She shut the book and put it beside her. “How’d you start working for Fairy Godfather?”
I thought of all the different lies I’d used in the past. Recruited for my talent, chosen for a rare gift of prophecy—I’d come up with a lot of lines. “My sister was born sick. She needed a miracle to keep her breathing, and she needed it soon.” I shifted lanes, gaining speed as I spoke. “Mom and Dad were getting desperate, and that’s the key to finding Grimm. You have to need him badly if you are a normal person. Folks with Glitter can walk right in.”
“I needed his help.” Ari’s statement seemed like a challenge, one I wasn’t interested in taking.
“I remember some of it. Dad crying, and Mom being upset, and Grimm talking to me from a mirror. He said he could help Hope, and he would do it, but there would be a price.” I swerved around a truck and punched the accelerator down, flying along so the wind hurt my eyes.
“So I said yes. I thought when I was done, I’d go home and my sister would be waiting for me. I thought they’d all be waiting for me, but the truth is, I won’t ever be free. I earn Glitter for every job and I work every chance I get and I’ll never be free.” I jingled my Agency bracelet. “Basically a part of him. Keeps me on a leash. Lets me talk to him. Lets him talk to me.”
“So throw it away and leave.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. I snapped the bracelet off and threw it out the window. The wind whipped it away.
Ari turned to see where it landed. “You ever visit your family?”
Her question touched a sore spot in my heart. I had a gap there the size of my memories, and I spent a lot of time not thinking about it, not mentioning it, and praying every time I woke up that that day I wouldn’t be reminded of what I’d lost. I slammed on the brake, skidding over to the side of the road. There were so many things I didn’t want to explain to her, and yet I needed someone to understand. I didn’t talk about this with anyone. I wasn’t even sure Evangeline knew about the memories. In fact, I hoped she didn’t. She’d take it as another sign of weakness.
“When I came to work for him, I was sad. Couldn’t work, couldn’t learn. So Grimm made me a deal. I let him hide most of the memories of my family. If I ever pay him off, I’ll take them back and I can go home.”
“Home as in where?” She took off her sunglasses to look at me. For a moment I felt like her eyes saw right into my soul.
“With them.” Where else could there possibly be?
Ari squinted at me like she used to before contacts. “How old are you?”
I knew how things were supposed to work. You got older. You moved out. You lived on your own, but the normal order of things never seemed to apply to my life. Everything had changed on that bitter December night.
I’d spent six years telling myself that this was “for now,” or “only until.” Even if I were free, I wouldn’t be that sixteen-year-old girl. Mom and Dad would welcome me for visits, I was sure. The truth was, I was never going home. I’d left on my eighteenth birthday, too foolish to realize what it meant.
“Mom and Dad said this was until . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I held up my arm and showed her the bracelet, hanging where it always did.
Ari reached out to touch it, making sure it was really there. The look of pity on her face made me jerk my hand away. Agents didn’t get pity until their funerals. We kept the silence the rest of the way.
THE WOLF TOWN was off the main highway, but I knew long before we arrived something was wrong. The smokehouses had no fire and the air stank of rotten meat that I hoped was pig. No guards at the branch road, no eyes on me as I pulled into town.
Ari wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?”
“Meat.” I hoped she wouldn’t ask more.
I got out of the car and looked around. “Anyone here? I want to talk.” My voice echoed back to me with the sound of crows.
“Come on,” I said to Ari, and I headed over to the building where Billy had gone to negotiate with the wolves. The odor of death filled the air as I opened the door and a cloud of flies buzzed out.
Ari vomited at the stench of decay. I was used to it.
The wolves lay dead where they had stood. Some slumped at tables, some lay on the floor, and the bartender draped across the bar. The worst was the flesh. Whatever it was had torn the skin from their bodies, tossing it onto the ground a few feet away.
Outside, the air smelled sweet with only the aroma of rotten pork.
Ari gagged again. “What? What happened?”
“Something magic. Fae magic.” The fae guard’s ability to tear people apart was legendary. Most legends had a grain of truth behind them. This one apparently had a boulder.
The larder, where the children had been kept, stood closed. I opened the door, praying that Billy and Evangeline had been to town recently. Inside, tiny figures slumped against the back wall. Flies spared me the need to check on them. I kicked the larder door in frustration and anger, glad that Ari wasn’t there to see me cry. She’d seen that enough already.
I was headed back to the car when it attacked: a half-wolf, tearing across the street toward Ari. She saw it and froze. I cursed her for blocking my shot, but it was already on her, teeth bared. It bit her once on the shoulder and rolled away, gagging and choking. I didn’t give it a chance to get up.
I put two bullets into each leg and another into its stomach. With the third bullet the half-wolf collapsed into the dirt. I rolled it over with my foot and put my gun to its head. It changed slowly, becoming more human. Ari approached, her arm dripping red.
“Tell me what happened or I keep shooting. Then I reload, and I shoot you some more.”
“The fae came for it, but we didn’t have it anymore. They took it. You took it,” said the wolf, now almost a man.
“Exactly who took what?
He convulsed and shivered, pain and fear wracking him. “The servants of the mirror.”
Nineteen
I LEFT HIM in the dirt, choking on his own blood. Wolves could survive a lot, and if he did, I didn’t care. I wasn’t usually a killer, though he frustrated me. Wolves were smarter than goblins, but pronouns must have given them headaches. “It” was not a proper name, though I suspected “it” might be as close as the wolf could come to naming the thing.
I took Ari to get her celebration stitches and slipped the doc an extra twenty to claim pink was the only color suture thread they had left. I’m pretty sure she knew. Ari held her arms and rocked in the seat as we drove across town. “How do you deal with it?”