“Marissa, I would ask if you were certain, but I know the answer.” Grimm crossed his arms and looked at me over his glasses.
“That’s crazy,” said Clara. “You gonna let her move in on you?”
“No, I am not.” Grimm kept his voice calm and low, with an unmistakable threat in his tone. “At the moment, there are certain problems. Foremost, that I have no idea where she might actually be.”
“Do the bunny thing, and then mug her in an alley,” I said. “It worked on me.”
Grimm shook his head. “You need to read more. I can’t enter another fairy’s domain any more than she could mine. The traditional way is to break her original mirror. As I stated, we don’t know where it is.”
“Then rumble with her directly.” Clara sat forward at the table like she was giving orders to him. “Even if you can’t approach her, you could make it bad enough that she’d move on. These tweens you hire nowadays might not understand, but I’ve seen what you can do.”
Grimm closed his eyes. “You have seen what I can do against normal creatures. Weaklings, like the fae, or the demons. Fairies cannot directly interact, our powers repel. We cannot approach each other.”
“Her mirror is at the hotel. She spoke to Marissa there,” said Ari.
Jess gave her a look of contempt. I’d gotten that look a thousand times from Evangeline, and learned to ignore it as best I could. Ari, on the other hand, started a Mexican standoff that could only end badly for her.
“No, young lady, her mirror, her original mirror is unlikely to be at the hotel,” said Grimm. “It would be somewhere safe.”
Ari looked at him. “Where is yours?”
Evangeline and I exchanged uncomfortable glances. Grimm would sooner give out his bank account numbers, vault codes, and turn over every bit of Glitter he owned.
“Someplace safe,” said Grimm, and Clara smiled.
“Her name is Odette. That ring a bell?” I asked Grimm.
His eyes grew slightly wider, but he kept his face impassive.
I glanced around the room. “She suggested one of us took the Seal. She offered me wishes, Grimm.”
An uncomfortable silence passed over the table. I kept waiting for Clara to say something stupid like, “You better not have taken them” or “Do you have any idea what you’ve done,” but she kept looking to Grimm. Grimm fidgeted for a moment. “May I have a word with Marissa alone?” In the stunned silence, no one moved. “That is not a request.”
One by one, they filed out. The jealous glare on Evangeline’s face, the accusing look Clara gave me, and the expression of worry on Ari’s face only added to my nerves.
I held up my hands. “I didn’t take them. She said they are weapons, and she’d hit me three times.”
“Why on earth would she do that?” Grimm’s look told me how much trouble I was in. I’d seen that look when people brought frog princes in after a month, when the spell was permanent, or asked if they could visit a baby a year after the imp took them.
“Because she threatened my family.” I swallowed, my mouth dry. “Also I hit her with a few pieces of obsidian. The mirror bled.”
Grimm scrunched up his face like I’d slapped him. “You struck a fairy with obsidian.”
“She fixed the mirror with fleshing silver and the blood just disappeared.” From the way he looked at me, I knew that this was a thousand times worse than the blessings. Maybe more.
“She will never forgive you.” His magic reached out and surrounded me. I felt it pouring through the bracelet like hot water, enveloping me. “While you are under my protection, she cannot so much as scratch you. I worry for you, my dear. There are ways to wound that do not leave a mark.”
“You know, I think it’s too coincidental that a fae child goes missing, the Seal gets stolen, and then a new fairy godmother shows up in town. Remember the magic show you took me to?” He once sent me to a theater where I watched it over and over until I could spot the cues and the hand movements that gave everything away.
“I do. If this is what we are meant to see, what do we not see?”
His question reminded me of something else eating at me. “I need to use the Visions Room.”
Grimm rolled his eyes. “Keep playing with those things and you’ll go blind.”
“This isn’t about my blessings. A witch said something to me. Something I need to check out. If Ari’s spirit sight is as bad as her normal vision, I wouldn’t trust her to tell me how many arms I’m holding up, let alone details.
Grimm’s gaze went to my hand, and I wondered if he was telling me the truth about not being able to see the mark. I’d found an engraving of it in the book, but part of me needed to know if it was really there.
“My dear, the Visions Room is undergoing maintenance. I’ll have the contractors work overtime to get it functional again. Someone has been putting tiny stress fractures on the prisms.”
“Grimm, if I had the handmaiden’s mark, you’d tell me, right?”
He flashed over to the cream decanter. Grimm leaned in toward me and spoke softly. “Spirit sight is not one of my formidable powers, my dear, but if it were, and if I could see it, and if you did have the handmaiden’s mark, I still would not tell you. The mark appeared on dozens of girls during her reign. It was a curse of its own kind. These girls were thrown out of their homes, driven away, sometimes killed for something they could neither see nor control. Most never heard her call.”
At that moment, the world exploded into gunfire and crashing, and I heard screams from the back room. Grimm was gone from the mirror. By the time I made it out the door and down the hall, the Agency was silent. A hole the size of a refrigerator was smashed through the back of the office. Jess lay twitching in a pool of blood, feebly trying to move her hands.
Ari came out from under the table. “It took him. A troll.”
Liam was gone. I glanced out the smashed window, and my stomach churned. Panic flooded my brain, threatening to drown me.
“Run,” said Grimm, in my ear, “straight for the window, and when you get there, jump.” Grimm had never recommended suicide before, so I figured he had a plan. I sprinted down the hallway at full speed to the gaping hole and did a perfect swan dive. I fell toward the ground, and as I did, I passed the troll. It was climbing its way down the building, Liam still in hand. The pavement was coming for my head, and fast.
I saw a glint of gold as the magic took shape, right before I hit the concrete. It felt like pillows, rolling into pillows. I came to my feet wondering why we didn’t use this more often. The troll dropped the last story down and landed on the trunk of a car.
Twelve feet tall, wide as a truck, with muscles like chewing gum, the troll looked at me and growled like an elephant and a lion mixed together. His sallow, yellow skin had mottled spots, and each hand had three fingers, long enough they wrapped clean around Liam’s rib cage.
“Stop,” I said, putting a bullet in one of its feet. “Or I’ll shoot.” I squeezed off a few more shots at the troll’s knees. It dropped Liam in a heap and came for me, but I had practiced this a dozen times. I rolled to the side as it stomped at me. I put another bullet into its knee and one in its butt. It roared with rage and kicked backwards at me. I almost made it out of the way. The foot hit me like a hammer. I heard a couple of ribs break and went flying into a windshield. Liability did not cover troll damage.
That’s when Liam picked up the bumper from the car he’d been dropped on and swung it, hitting the troll right upside its runty little head.
Troll skulls were mostly bone. It turned to grab him, giving him a squeeze for good measure until he turned blue. It lumbered off, dragging him along. I shook the glass out of my hair and ran. Straight across the tops of the cars I ran, ruining six different paint jobs. At the corner I jumped onto its back.