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SEVENTEEN

Sorsha

I didn’t think I’d ever seen Antic quite so invigorated, which was saying a lot considering she was the most excitable being I’d ever met. She bounced up and down on her little feet as she led us through the thinly forested area that bordered a post golf course. The teenage son of one of the players blasted a jaunty ska tune from his phone for a minute or so before the employees hustled over to scold him, and the rollicking tune matched the imp’s exuberance perfectly.

“The gnome said he’s been living in this city for almost fifty years,” she exclaimed breathlessly. “He must have been here when you were born, Sorsha. Maybe he knows about the hunters who killed your parents!”

I’d also never heard anyone speak quite that cheerfully about a double homicide. “Maybe,” I said, tugging at the hem of the starchy button-up blouse I’d had to wear for this adventure. My shadowkind companions had been able to slip across the grounds to the shelter of the trees invisibly, of course, but I’d needed to disguise myself as one of the staff to avoid questioning. As long as no one asked me to distinguish between a putter and a driver, we were good.

Under the canopy of leaves, this section of the grounds was cooler and dimmer than the grassy stretch under the morning sun I’d left behind. I eased aside a low branch blocking my way and continued that thought. “Or at least he might have known my guardian. Luna could have told him something about them or me, or…”

Or how I’d come to be the only human being I’d ever heard of with magical powers.

“If he has any answers, we’ll get them out of him,” Omen said. The words could have been menacing—they usually would have been, coming from him—but his tone was mild, almost as if he was trying to reassure me. Hold the presses! The ice-cold hellhound might be softening up after all.

It didn’t seem totally fair to think about him in those joking terms anymore, though. He had accepted this substantial detour in his quest to let me investigate my heritage. Now, that might be in large part because he didn’t want his secret weapon incinerating herself before we were done destroying the baddies, but I’d take the generosity anyway.

“Are gnomes dangerous?” Snap asked by my other side. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one.” His grip on my hand adjusted to twine our fingers more tightly together. As pleased as all our companions had been to find out he’d come back to himself, he’d stuck like glue to me since last night—and I couldn’t say I minded. I was still wrapping my mind around the fact that I had my devourer back and that the intimacy we’d shared might not be so fleeting after all.

“The worst he’s likely to do is bite her knees,” Omen said with a crooked smile.

Snap squeezed my hand. “I won’t let him do that!”

The hellhound shifter shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t think we really need to worry about that unless our mortal here decides to start using him as a soccer ball. But if he’s a particularly rabid one, I think we can manage to save her.”

“I’ll restrain myself from playing any contact sports with our informant,” I said.

We’d decided not to bring the full group on this excursion-slash-interrogation so as not to intimidate the gnome too much, but naturally Bossypants couldn’t allow anything to happen without being there to oversee, and Snap had refused to let me out of his sight. Thorn and Ruse were patrolling the edges of the golf course at a greater distance. I definitely didn’t feel in any danger from the being we intended to meet.

Antic halted by an aged stump about the height of my waist and knocked on it. From the thump, the thing was hollow. “Hello there!” she chirped. “I’m back with my friends that I told you about.”

Omen couldn’t manage to stop his lips from curling in disdain at being referred to as one of the imp’s “friends,” but he schooled his expression into something if not friendly than at least emotionless rather than openly hostile.

A little man wavered out of the shadows around the stump. And by “little,” we’re talking little . Like, the dude barely came up to my knees. Although I guessed that did put him in the perfect position to bite them if he decided that was a fun way to pass the time after all.

Other than the absence of a pointed cap, he looked disturbingly like the garden gnomes—you know, the ceramic kind—I was more familiar with than the real deal. His chubby cheeks were rosy above a tuft of silvery beard, his eyes twinkled, and his diminutive body was stout and plump beneath his bright blue jacket and emerald trousers.

Despite the twinkle in his eyes, which I guessed was a permanent feature and not an expression of joy, he was frowning. “What’s this all about?” he muttered in a reedy voice. “I don’t like showing myself when there are mortals around.”

Unlikely he’d been fast friends with my parents, then. I crouched down so I wasn’t towering over him quite so much and flashed him a smile. “I’m really sorry. We just wanted to ask a few questions about things that happened quite a long time ago. There aren’t very many shadowkind who’ve stuck with this city with as much dedication as you have.”

The flattery got me somewhere. The little man puffed up his chest, and his frown faded even though it didn’t disappear completely. “I know when I’ve got a good thing. What is it you wanted to know?”

“There was a fae woman who lived around here about thirty years ago. Her name was Luna. In her shadowkind form, she had filmy wings and she was pretty sparkly… well, like faeries are. I don’t suppose you ever ran into her?”

The gnome rubbed his chin. “Luna. Luna. I can’t say that name sounds at all familiar.”

As my heart sank, he waved a finger in the air. “I know who you might ask, though. She’s rather fickle, as faeries are too, but they do often gravitate to their own kind. There’s a fae by the name of Daisy that hangs around out back of the lighting store over that-a-ways. It’s been a time since I went that way, but she’s been in this city almost as long as I have, I think, so I don’t see why she’d have left. You could try her.”

He motioned to the east toward this lighting store. Well, that was the start of a trail, at least.

As I straightened up, Omen cleared his throat. He didn’t bother lowering himself to the gnome’s level. “One more thing. At least a couple of decades ago, powerful shadowkind might have come through the city asking about a being they’d have said was dangerous—one named Ruby.”

The gnome paused, and then his eyes widened. The recollection made him quiver on his feet. “Oh, yes, I didn’t like those ones that asked about it. Three times they badgered me—a lot less politely than you lot.”

“Three times?” Omen repeated. “Did you know something about Ruby?”

“Not at all. But they seemed to be making the rounds over and over thinking they’d turn something new up. I can’t say why. It must have been over the course of at least a month they kept coming around.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Like you said, years and years ago.” The little man grimaced. “I’d put it out of my mind.”

“All right. That’s helpful to know.” Omen gave the gnome a slight but definite tip of his head in thanks.

“I guess we’ll have to hope this fae who might or might not be at the lighting store will have more dirt to dish,” I said as we headed in the direction he’d pointed us.

Snap cocked his head to one side. “How do humans sell light ?”

I wasn’t going to get into the extent that we actually did, or I’d end up needing to explain the entire science of electricity. “They just sell fancy ways of generating that light for inside our houses. Lamps and ceiling fixtures and all that.”

“Ah, yes! They had many glowing things like that in the hotel that were lovely to look at.” The devourer beamed so brightly at the memory that we probably could have put him up for sale in the store.

Omen, on the other hand, was frowning now as if the gnome’s expression had been contagious. “We do know more than we did before. There must have been a reason the Highest’s minions would have focused on this city more than others. If there was a definite sighting of ‘Ruby’ here, or more than just a sighting—we might be able to pick up that trail while we’re here too.”

I didn’t know why he’d frown about getting closer to this shadowkind he figured might help us, but with Omen, sometimes it was better not to ask.

The lighting store was easy to spot: a big building with massive amounts of crystal fixtures glittering in its broad windows. Snap re-emerged from the shadows in time to take in the view in all its splendor with an awed inhalation, careful to hold his forked tongue out of sight.

Antic had vanished from view with the others while we’d headed out of the golf course. As we came around the back of the store, she sprang into sight again, pointing at a little house that was really more of a hut, wedged between the rear end of two neighboring shops. The paint on its clapboard front and slanted roof had dulled and faded, but I could tell it’d once been a vibrant pink and blue. That looked like a fae’s design sense, all right.

“Is she around?” I asked without thinking the question through.

“I can pop in and check!” the imp offered, and sprang toward the closed door.

“Hold on!” I said quickly. I should have remembered she didn’t have much sense of boundaries. “I’d imagine it’ll give a better impression if we’re polite enough to knock rather than barging right in.”

Antic shrugged as if it was all the same to her and rapped her small fist against the door. “Daisy?”

Omen stepped closer. No visible hint of his shadowkind form showed, but his aura of power intensified enough that the energy tickled over my skin. “We know you’re here, and you know we’re shadowkind,” he said to the patches of darkness around the house. “We only want to ask a few questions. I’d rather not have to get more insistent about that.”

I smacked his arm. “What did I just say about politeness?”

He gave me a baleful look. “I phrased that threat very politely.” He turned his gaze back to the house. “To be clear, I’d much rather keep things peaceful.”

What was he going to do if the fae woman didn’t emerge—dive into the shadows and wrench her out by force? She’d be just overjoyed to answer our questions then.

I made a face at him and attempted my own plea. “We wouldn’t be asking—or being assholes about it, in the case of someone I won’t name—if it wasn’t important. It’s about a fae named Luna who used to live in Austin a long time back. A gnome suggested you might have known her.”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then a form shimmered into being in front of us.

The fae woman wasn’t Luna’s twin or anything, but she had enough of the same fae features that I could have believed they were cousins. Her pale hair sparkled in the pigtails she’d wrapped with shiny pink ribbons; actual glitter gleamed all over her frilly dress. She’d draped several strands of crystalline glass that looked as though she might have stolen them from the store’s chandeliers over her shoulders as an opulent sort-of necklace. Her features were delicate except for her eyes, which were just a little too large to look comfortably human. Those eyes fixed on me.

“You know Luna?” she said in a tinkling voice that reminded me of my guardian too, so much that my lungs constricted. “It’s been so long—I kept hoping she might come back.”

The constricting sensation deepened. She didn’t know that Luna couldn’t ever come back. “Luna… looked after me when I was a kid. But she was taken down by hunters several years ago. I’m sorry. Were you close when we lived here?”

“Oh, no. She’s gone?” The woman’s face fell for a moment before she seemed to recover. Her makeshift finery tinkled as she shifted on her feet. “I couldn’t say we were really close, but, you know…”

She tipped her head to the side and gave me a dreamy smile that sent another wave of recognition through me. I hadn’t really talked to any fae women other than Luna—I hadn’t realized how much she simply represented her kind rather than her own unique approach to life. Apparently coyness was another common trait.

“I always wished we could be better friends,” the fae went on. “She had so much energy; it was lovely to be around her. But she was so busy too…”

I fought past the eerie resemblance to focus on my search for answers. “Do you know who else she spent time with? Was there anyone in particular?”

“Let me see, let me see… It was so long ago!” She tapped her lips with another cutesy tip of her head to send her pigtails bobbing. “She mostly stuck to the downtown area. I can’t think of anyone still around who’d—oh. There was the elf. I always wondered why she bothered with him . But I saw them together a bunch of times.”

I’d take whatever leads I could get. “And this elf is still in the city? Where we could find him?”

“Oh, he came from the worst place. I don’t go out that way anymore, but he never moved that I knew of. He might still be there.”

“ Where ?” Omen demanded, the threatening edge coming back into his voice.

The fae woman let out a faint huff, and I was afraid she’d vanish rather than tolerate his tone. But she wanted to dish her gossip more. “He lived in the sewer of all places. Near the spot where the busy road crosses the river.” She shuddered. “The one time I talked to him, he said no mortals would ever oust him there, but I could never tolerate it.”

“Thank you,” I said, and then, since the hellhound shifter had at least tried to support me in his overbearing way, added, “I don’t suppose you know about anyone named Ruby? Shadowkind might have come around asking about that name a while back too.”

“Ruby… Ruby… That does sound familiar. I thought if it’d been an actual ruby, I’d have cared more.” She tittered. “They were so insistent about it, but I don’t keep track of every being in this place.”

Nothing more than the gnome had told us about that one, then. Even less, really. “Thank you,” I said again anyway.

She bobbed her head and blinked away, shooting a hint of a glare at Omen just before she vanished. He simply rolled his eyes.

“I wonder why anyone was so interested in this Ruby shadowkind,” Snap said as we headed to the Everymobile. “It doesn’t sound as if the local beings even knew about them before the Highest sent their underlings around to ask.”

I knit my brow. “That’s a good point. If—she?—did something so offensive that the Highest shadowkind wanted to bring her in, wouldn’t someone have heard about what she actually did ?”

“I think you’re missing the obvious,” Omen said in a dark tone.

“What do you mean?”

He looked over at me, his expression grim but not cold. “The search for this Ruby happened somewhere around the same time as your birth. We haven’t determined yet how you got your powers, which no mortal should have. Maybe Ruby was in the habit of imbuing shadowkind skills on beings that weren’t meant to have them.”

A chill pooled in my gut. “You’re saying?—”

“I’m saying our two mysteries might almost be the same one. It’s starting to seem like an awfully big coincidence otherwise. Whoever this Ruby is, maybe it’s because of her that you are as you are.”