Crime Spells Part 31

She needed information more than anything right now.

She wrapped the mirror in a handy black dishcloth to keep it safe from prying eyes and prying eyes safe from it for the time being. Slipped it into her coat pocket and let herself out into the cold, bright afternoon.

A loose corner of the yellow notice stapled to her door whipped in the wind, caught at her coat. Her blood pressure rose. She tore at the paper. Some of the peeling paint came with it. She crumbled the ma.s.s into a ball so small you couldn't see the brown streaks of color, or where the paper said CONDEMNED.

Had the inspector messed with anything when he'd come to fix that G.o.dforsaken thing to her door? She scanned the short, wide porch meant for warm weather sitting, for catching a breeze and listening to the cicadas. All her s.h.i.+ny gla.s.s baubles still hung from the eaves. The windows on either side of the door looked like rheumy eyes. There was life in them still.

Gra.s.s grew tall and seedy against the sides of the house, the tips of the stems thick as fingers. One of them clutched a size ten brown work boot.

So much for the inspector.

She stepped lively down the walk to the gate, sparing some narrow-eyed contempt for the three-story town homes across the way with their manicured hedges and beds of red and purple pansies soaking up the late afternoon sun. The developers sold them for three hundred grand and up. Criminals, she called them.

But there was also the corner store she'd shopped at for years, its parking lot stained with grease and stinking of burned motor oil, its windows still tacky with fake, sprayed-on snow and the gummy outlines of stick-on Christmas trees taken down two weeks past. Mr. Johnson waved at her from behind the counter.

And Rick, who hunkered down on the asphalt around the way and out of sight of Mr. Johnson, who had been homeless for years and preferred it that way, eating out of a Styrofoam to-go container and sharing his meal with his two big, yellow dogs.

Cars, pickups, and buses roared past, racing the traffic lights. Everyone in a hurry. Headed north into downtown's gla.s.s, steel, and concrete canyons. Or out to the freeways and the suburbs.

Addie walked east, briskly at first and then more carefully as the cold seeped through to her old bones and her arthritic hip began to mouth off. Seven long blocks, into the shadow of the baseball stadium and the warehouses to the bar.

She knocked on the door. Seven-foot-tall Ingram, the bouncer, tipped his ball cap to her as she went inside. She inclined her head, although he didn't much notice; he'd already returned his attention to cavernous main room, where a few regulars cl.u.s.tered around tables drinking and doing business amid the low hum of conversation and the clink of gla.s.ses. The dry heat that pumped from the vents didn't quite chase away the chill, and it made her cough.

She took the winding staircase one ache at a time to the PI offices on the second floor. What the heat failed to do downstairs, it made up here in spades. She took her coat off.

Mike stood in the doorway of suite 201-B, his flattop full and bristly as it had been when they'd met; he'd worn his hair like that all his life. He wore a plain t-s.h.i.+rt, jeans, and sneakers. His neighbors dressed up in leather now, used it like a billboard to advertise how tough they were. Mike didn't need all that to look tough. The lines around his eyes and mouth said it all.

His office held a beat-up metal desk with a veneer top and chairs. Nothing on the walls. He liked to keep the important things out of sight.

He settled down in his chair and offered her one, but she perched on the desk. She felt too on edge to get comfortable.

One look at the mirror and he p.r.o.nounced her screwed.

"It's a Faery gla.s.s," he said, careful not to gaze into it straight on.

"I thought it was harmless. And rare."

He leaned back, turned the mirror face-down on his thigh. "Oh, they're rare all right. Anyone in the human world looks in one, they can see straight through to Faery. Anyone in the Faery realm can do the same thing-see all the way through to this world. These things are more windows than mirrors.

"And they don't just pa.s.s hand-to-hand around the city by accident," he said. "Once they're given to a person, they belong to that person and can't be taken away, only regifted. Addie, whoever gave you this did it on purpose."

"Jennifer." And she thought she'd put one over on the kid. Boy, had she been wrong.

"What do you know about her?"

Addie shrugged. "What do I know about most of my customers?"

"That they're easy marks. Right." He ran a fingertip along the edge of the desk where the veneer had peeled. "What'd you see in the gla.s.s?"

"I saw my own reflection, but I looked as I did around the time we got married," she said.

"Something sweet. To get you to take the mirror off Jennifer's hands."

Aw, h.e.l.l.

"What else?"

"I can't tell you, Mike."

He nodded. "This is about your contract with the Fae. Same stuff all over again."

"It is."

"I haven't asked you about that since we split up," he said. "But I'm going to have to ask you about it again. No direct questions."

She could handle that.

"I know the terms of your contract even if I don't know everything else. You've kept the terms never to tell a soul, no one else can know?"

"Yes. To the letter."

"Is the thing you saw in the mirror the Fae being you made the bargain with?" he asked.

"No."

He frowned. "Then the agreement's broken. Someone else knows."

Who? The poppet?

That changeling still ought to be indistinguishable from a human being in the human world, all grown up by now. Maybe married, popped out a baby or two of its own, along came the grandkids. As she understood it, the changeling would never discover it wasn't human. Never leave the human realm.

What had happened to change all that?

"You can tell me now," Mike said. "Tell me everything. It won't matter to the Fae if you do."

It mattered to her. "It's bad."

"For me to get you out of this, I need to know, Addie."

But there was no way out. Fae contracts had no loopholes. You couldn't run or hide from them. You couldn't outsmart them. This time she'd spent in Mike's office-every minute from here on out-would be the only time they had left together.

How could she tell him? She never wanted to see his expression broken and wary, for him to look at her as though he couldn't decide if she was a monster. Or a stranger. She'd have no right to expect anything different.

More than that, though, she wasn't the same person who'd done that terrible thing to save herself. Time and experience had worked their own magic on her. She'd changed.

"I'm sorry, Mike," she said. And she meant it.

He twined his fingers with hers. Squeezed her hand. "I figured you'd say that."

She closed her eyes so she wouldn't have to look at the love in his. His determination filled every molecule of air in the room. She could all but hear the wheels turn in his mind.

"If we can find Jennifer, we can get to the bottom of this. I won't let you go without a fight," he said, his voice full of fierce and stupid hope. "We've gotta go now, and fast. Stay ahead of the Fae until we can get a bead on things. If we can't run from this problem, then we run at it."

He shoved her coat into her arms. Pulled her out of the office and down the hall.

Whatever he wanted, she'd try to do it. She tried to hope, too. No matter how alien it felt.

Or that it lasted all of ten seconds.

Ingram met them at the second floor landing. "Trouble," he said.

Red eyes. Black wings, difficult to camouflage under human clothes. At the bottom of the stairs.

She kissed Mike's cheek.

"Don't go," he said.

But of course she had to. She let go of his hand and walked down to meet the Fae with her head held high. She hadn't cringed since the last time Fred had struck her-all those fifty years ago-and she didn't intend to start again now.

She glanced back only once, to rea.s.sure Mike. But he'd vanished.

"The letter of the agreement has been broken," the Fae said, in a voice so deep it rattled her bones. "The changeling has discovered what it is, abandoned its human life and its family. It came back to us."

"How?"

"Politics," the Fae said. "It was the work of an enemy, exposing this secret. One of my enemies."

Addie closed her eyes. It was so unfair. This whole mess-the changeling had done nothing to cause it. And it wasn't Addie's or Jennifer's or even this Fae's fault.

She could rail against the unfairness of it, but she'd known the rules when she agreed to them all those years ago. The terms that bound all of them. "So what's my fate worse than death?"

"You'll come with me," the Fae said. That was all. That was enough.

She'd never see Mike again. Never go home again, never see all the treasures on their shelves in her sun-dappled kitchen. There'd be no more unwitting p.a.w.n customers to bake cookies for.

The life she'd built on the backs of that little girl she'd switched and her parents would be gone. It was the only life she had.

Well, at least she'd had one. Not everyone did.

The Fae led her out into an afternoon laced with evening. The new sickle moon hung low on the horizon, the sky streaked with orange and pink. The wind tore at her. She shrugged her coat on and pulled it tight across her chest, breathing car exhaust and the salt scent of her own tears.

She saw Mike at the corner of the building. That alien hope flared in her again... and sputtered.

She memorized every angle of him, the rhythm of his gait as he strode over and spoke to the Fae.

"I won't try to stop you taking her. I came to ask you something." He didn't wait for the Fae to respond. "I wanted to know who broke the contract between you and Addie, since she sure as h.e.l.l didn't. I'd have searched regardless, after you'd taken Addie away. And I'd have started with a young lady named Jennifer, who brought Addie a looking gla.s.s today."

The Fae looked pointedly at the mirror handle sticking up from Mike's back pocket.

"You know, I thought it'd take me hours," Mike said. "It's a big city. She could've been anywhere. But do you know where I found her? She was right here the whole time. Outside, out of view, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. She's still over there, matter of fact. Why is that?"

"Jennifer followed Addie," the Fae said. He turned to her. "You're the last human being she saw before she came to live with us. You're the reason her whole life changed."

Jennifer, the human child she'd stolen? She was so young-but, then, time moved much more slowly in the Fae realm.

Mike held Addie's gaze. "I want to know what happened, Addie. And I want to know why."

"No." She'd made up her mind about that upstairs, and it'd stay that way. She understood, too, that there was someone else she would have to tell. Someone else to whom she owed that story first.

They left Mike standing there on the walk, staring after them.

Jennifer joined them half way down the block, keeping a fair distance as they walked into the sunset. She seemed to be gathering the nerve to say something.

Addie braced herself for a tirade. For rage. For grief. But the girl didn't show her any of those.

"Did you know my mother?" she asked.

And, somehow, that was worse.

Addie hated Faery. Everywhere green and in bloom, in colors so bright they hurt her eyes and sounds so sharp they hurt her ears. They gave her a room of her own, and she supposed she should be grateful.

They gave her new terms. Do what they told her. Obey the letter of their laws. And there were so many laws to learn. It took up all her time. She had no treasures-other than her own company.

Until the day Jennifer knocked on her door, carrying a brown paper-wrapped package, and asked what had happened and why.

Addie started slowly, with Hot Corner Fred. Not that she expected Jennifer to understand or to forgive her, but because it felt important to say she hadn't done it for kicks. Or for any more power than power over her own life.

She told Jennifer about the smell of fresh paint in the living room of the dark, still house. Parents asleep in their bedroom with the door cracked wide enough to hear a crying child. The infant with the strawberry blonde curls and pink-flowered pajama set, asleep in her crib.

The rhythm of the child's breath held her in thrall for what seemed like forever but couldn't have been more than a minute or two-until the little one scrunched up her face and waved her arms.

She had to move then.

Five long minutes to recite the spell she'd been given to hush the baby and the s.p.a.ce around her so she wouldn't wake. To wrap her in a blanket and replace her with a homemade doll made of sc.r.a.ps and sticks. To do as she'd been ordered: keep from bolting long enough to witness the poppet come to life. She watched the doll a.s.sume the glamor the Fae had charmed into it. Take on every detailed characteristic of the baby who belonged in that crib.

She brought the baby to the Fae. G.o.d, but he looked like the devil. She expected him to smell like sulfur. But he smelled like green. Like crushed gra.s.s.

He took the child from her arms. Never tell a soul, he said. No one may find out. Those are the terms. On pain of a fate worse than death.

Then, she went back to the place she shared with Fred. He'd been killed, just as the Fae promised her. She stepped over his body to get her things. She left and never looked back.

Addie finished the story, her last word echoing off the walls.

"Thank you," Jennifer said.

Addie took a deep breath and blew it out. "I never even knew what the Fae wanted you for. At the time, I didn't care."

"He told me he wanted to be a father."