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Chapter Four

The security team finished up around three a.m., when I was just getting to the point of being so tired I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. Mitch left Maia to bunk down in the guest room we kept for the security team and Jake on patrol in the garden.

I didn’t argue. It was his job to make the calls when it came to our safety—at least where it didn’t interfere with me helping the Cestis—so whether I liked it or not, he was in charge.

Damon and I crawled into bed, too tired to do anything but fall asleep, curled around each other as comfort against any more things going bump in the dark.

Damon’s alarm went off far too early. I barely managed to open an eye and mutter something as close to ‘see you later’ as I could manage on three hours sleep before pulling the pillow over my head and falling back to sleep until my own alarm went off around eight. I cut it off with a wave of my hand and forced myself out of bed, heading for the shower before I could give in to the temptation to ignore the alarm and sleep the day away.

I used every ‘wake me up’ option Damon’s complicated shower offered, alternating pummeling jets of water with cold bursts that made me yelp and regret my life choices.

Five hours sleep wasn’t much better than three.

I was staring at myself in the mirror, trying to ignore my dark circles, my long brown hair falling damp on my bare shoulders, when Madge announced Lizzie was at the gate.

“Let her in. Tell her I’ll be five minutes.”

I hastily threw on some clothes, dried my hair as best I could, and then followed the smell of coffee to the kitchen where Lizzie was perched on one of the stools at the counter, watching Maia make coffee. Maia was in her usual black, everything immaculately ironed, and her dark hair braided away from her face. Lizzie, in contrast, wore a daffodil-yellow sundress with bright-blue combat boots. She’d left her hair loose for once. It was nearly true silver, almost sparkling in the sun pouring through the windows.

I assumed it was some kind of nano effect, but required caffeine before I could form the words to ask.

Real coffee was one of the perks of dating Damon I would never take for granted. Maia tried to pass me the mug she’d just poured, but she had had as little sleep as me so I made her take it and waited for the machine to produce the strongest espresso it was programmed for. Damon usually made the coffee himself, overriding the programming. I knew how, but this morning I was happy to let the tech take care of it and save my brainpower.

We all drank coffee silently for a few minutes, Lizzie unusually quiet despite the sunny outfit. There were faint dark smudges under her brown eyes. Had she had an interrupted night as well?

When she yawned and stretched and I spotted the familiar sheen of a spray bandage on her left arm, I answered my own question.

I pointed at the bandage. “What happened there?”

Lizzie grimaced. “It’s fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Zee and I were doing another sweep through Dockside. Someone reported a ‘giant bug’ climbing a wall to the police.”

“And the police responded?” Most of Dockside was a no-go zone for cops. The city had essentially abandoned the area. Too much damage and no one willing to step in and spend the money to restabilize the docks and build the infrastructure to keep back the water. It had been tried on other parts of the city’s shorelines with varying degrees of success. Some areas had recovered, some were still teetering on the edge of might make it back, and Dockside had been declared a failure. So, no cops. Not unless a VIP got into trouble down there, and even then it would have to be someone very VIP.

“The police recorded the call in their system. The Cestis has been monitoring for key words and phrases, as usual. And ‘giant bug’ was one of them, so we got pinged.”

The Cestis operated independently of the other arms of the law when it came to magic users, but it also piggybacked off existing infrastructure where it could. I didn’t know the full extent of its resources, or how many witches Cassandra and the others commanded, but I knew they couldn’t hope to cover the whole country without using other agencies. They just had to do it discreetly.

“So, an afrit?” Maia asked.

Lizzie shook her hair, the effect somewhat mesmerizing as the silver sparkled. “Not that we could find. Of course, down there, it could have been someone having a really bad trip.”

“So officially it’s a figment of a Dockside-induced hallucination?” I said.

She nodded but her mouth had flattened into a dissatisfied line.

“And unofficially?”

“I’m not sure. We’ll keep looking. But it’s been, what, more than a month since you killed yours? It could have been a loner.” She ran her hand down her arm, stopping where the spray bandage started, massaging the skin above it gently, as though it was annoying her. Or the lack of success finding the afrit was.

Afrit, though not common, did sometimes turn up in the city. Anywhere there’d been imps or lesserkind who used them for various low-level tasks and mischief. They could climb walls, burrow underground, and infiltrate places imps couldn’t. The Cestis rooted them out and killed them where they could, but it was nearly impossible to find them all.

Without any other demonkind directing them, they seemed to live like large bugs, eating—I assumed—rats and pigeons and garbage and avoiding contact with humans unless something magical caught their attention.

“Right. A loner,” I echoed Lizzie as Maia rose to refill her mug.

Lizzie’s blue eyes were skeptical. My gut agreed with her. And wasn’t happy about it.

“So we just keep monitoring the reports?”

“Yes,” Lizzie said. She and Zee and Cassandra had spent more than a few nights working their way around Dockside since Callum and I had killed an afrit down there. Callum and Gráinne and I had, too, under the guise of training. None of us had found any trace of other afrit, but they could hide in places impossible for humans to follow and if there weren’t groups of them and they were mostly dormant, they didn’t leave a strong enough magical signature to trace easily.

Though I was much better at sensing even faint traces of demon magic these days.

“Do you want Maia to look at your arm?” I asked Lizzie. She was rubbing the spot above the bandage again.

“No, I’m icy. Scratched it on some chain link. Zee cleaned it out for me.” She moved her left hand around in exaggerated bends and swoops, demonstrating it was fully functional. “See.”

Except for the part where it was hurt, probably. But my skills at healing were limited at best, so I had to take her word for it. Zee wouldn’t take any chances when it came to Lizzie, though, so if he’d cleaned and dressed the wound, it would have been thorough.

“Fine, fine. I’ll stop nagging. I’m sorry Cassandra dragged you out here,” I said with an apologetic grimace.

“Not a problem. It is, after all, my job.”

One of her jobs. Like Aubrey, she was the youngest on the US Cestis; at twenty-three she was eight years younger than Aubrey, who was my age.

But Lizzie wasn’t content with merely helping police the magical world. She also worked part-time at Spark, a charity for kids with troubled backgrounds. She didn’t need to, but if push came to shove, I would bet good money she’d choose helping those kids over the Cestis and magic. They were a cause too close to her heart.

Her father was an exceedingly wealthy man. But also a massively controlling and abusive asshole. He had, thankfully, dropped dead a few years ago.

Lizzie ran away from home at fourteen, somehow ending up in San Francisco, though she’d grown up on the East Coast. She’d lived on the streets, or in squats. Luckily she’d fallen in with a group of guys around her age—including Zee—who had been more interested in gaming than drugs, and the four of them had managed to eke out an existence in game clubs and doing odd jobs for a couple of years until Lizzie had crossed paths with Cassandra, who’d helped them all get back on track.

Cassandra pulled strings so Lizzie got her trust fund early, and her mother added to it after her father died. But, as far as I knew, Lizzie had no other contact with any of her family on either side. She and her mother loved each other, in their way, but the fact her mom had stayed with her dad had fractured their relationship in a way that, so far, Lizzie didn’t seem interested in fixing.

So she knew what the kids she tried to help were going through and gave up time she didn’t really have, to see if she could change their lives the way Cassandra had changed hers.

I was surrounded by a bunch of overly-dedicated-to-their-jobs enthusiasts. Or workaholics to put it bluntly. Not that I was any better. Note to self: make some friends who liked doing things like taking lazy island vacations and brunching and could teach the rest of us how to relax. I didn’t like my chances of meeting anyone like that at Riley or through the Cestis. And I didn’t want to think about island vacations because right now, the main thing islands brought to mind was the damned photograph of my mom and Jack.

Time to work. I needed something to focus on if I wanted to avoid finding the nearest comfortable flat surface and napping.

“Where’s Jake?” I asked Maia. After a night patrolling the garden, he deserved coffee, too.

“He reported in thirty minutes ago and Mitch told him he could go home. There weren’t any more incidents.”

I already knew that. Jake would have raised the alarm if he’d spotted another nixling.

“Maia said you both checked the wards and couldn’t see anything,” Lizzie said, putting down her empty mug with a wistful glance at the coffee machine. Her ‘more coffee will be bad for me later, but I’d really like it now’ face. I knew how she felt.

Lizzie had more willpower than me when it came to caffeine, so I restrained myself so I wouldn’t tempt her into another cup. She deserved to sleep well when she finally got to go to bed. “No. Everything looks normal. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.”

“Well, it means nothing else got through them. We need to ask Callum if he has any ideas about how to keep nixlings out, or whether it’s a waste of time trying,” I said.

“Agreed,” Lizzie said. “I’ll go over the wards, so Cassandra is happy, and then you and I can go to Berkeley and see what Callum has to say.” Her hair shimmered as she considered me. “Unless of course you had something else to do this morning?”

Technically I had client work, but it was just data analysis I could run in the background and read the reports later. I had a couple of jobs to finish up before I started my stint working on Damon’s new game. That would keep me busy for a month. I also had to go through my current list of project offers and make sure I had work lined up for when I was done at Righteous. Damon would have happily employed me full-time, but I’d worked too hard at my business to give it up just yet. And sure, ferreting out problems for some of my other clients wasn’t always as fun or cutting edge as working for him, but it was still interesting, and people still wanted my help.

I was hoping Yoshi might have some time to help me out over the summer, before his classes started up again. He always made the workload lighter, but I also wanted him to enjoy his summer vacation time. Like the rest of us, he had workaholic tendencies, between looking after his sister and trying to cram in vacation internships at various tech companies. So I’d have to see what he wanted to do.

“Nothing urgent.” I nodded my head toward the fridge. “Do you want me to help you with the checks, or do I have time for breakfast?”

“Eat. Maia can take me round. She knows the wards as well as we do.”

Well, she knew the witchy parts of them and the ins and outs of the security system. Callum was the one who’d added some additional Fae touches. I knew enough about those to know how to spot a problem, but I didn’t yet know enough Fae magic to alter them myself. Neither did Lizzie, but she might see something I’d missed.

Lizzie was thorough. It was more than an hour before she and Maia came back into the house.

I’d started working but focusing was proving difficult. I kept thinking about the nixling and what it could have wanted.

Not a useful train of thought. I had no way of knowing. I shut down my desk comp when I heard Lizzie’s footsteps coming down the hallway. Maia wore combat boots, too, but hers were military grade and she managed to be stealthy in them. Lizzie stomped cheerfully when she didn’t need to be quiet.

She poked her head through the door. “I didn’t find anything. Let’s talk to Callum.”

Callum was still using my house in Berkeley as a base. Which gave me an excuse to put off making the decision as to whether I was going to keep it or not.

On the one hand, it used to be home. My grandparents’ house, the house where I’d first found a real home when I’d come there after my mother had died. On the other hand, it had been destroyed once in the Big One and then again by Jack. I’d rebuilt it twice now and with each passing week it felt a little bit farther away from my memories and a little bit harder to justify why I was keeping it when I was basically living at Damon’s.

Still, I didn’t have to make my decision while it offered a handy base for Callum and Gráinne when they were training me or doing whatever arcane Fae things Cerridwen set them to do in the city.

She’d seemed happy enough to add Gráinne to the roster, claiming it was easier to have two of them working outside the realm to train me and Pinky and help the Cestis see if they could hunt down stray afrit. I pretended to believe her, but the other reason—the one no one was talking about and that I didn’t really want to think about too hard—was that I’d potentially made an enemy of Lord Usuriel. Fae weren’t supposed to interfere with humans, but Usuriel hadn’t struck me as a rule follower.

And Cerridwen hadn’t invited me back into the realm yet.

Which I assumed meant she was still trying to calm things down and didn’t want to risk my safety. The thought of Lord Usuriel on the warpath made me more than happy to have an extra s’ealg oiche on my team.

The Lord of the Nichtkin scared me.

We found Callum sitting out back, sipping tea out of one of Lizzie’s sparkly pink ‘Unicorns are real’ mugs. The matching teapot was sitting on my cheap wooden outdoor table. Somehow, despite the wonky table and the silly mug, Callum, dressed in a white linen shirt and dark jeans, managed to exude elegance.

He nodded a greeting as we came down the steps. “That was fast.”

“Not much traffic.” Lizzie dragged the chair next to Callum’s away from the table, sat and turned her face up to the sun, eyes squeezed shut.

Clearly she needed a moment.

My neighbor’s dog, Ted, realizing Lizzie and I were home, started barking eagerly from behind the fence. I went over, climbed up the rail to say hello. He wagged his tail as I rubbed his ears but started barking again when I stopped. He was still wary of Callum, which Callum didn’t seem to take personally.

Ted pointed his nose in Callum’s direction and barked again.

“I know, I know. He can do things you don’t approve of. But he’s fine.” I rubbed his ears again, appreciating the simplicity of a happy dog that wasn’t a Fae creature.

But I couldn’t use Ted as an excuse for too long. I heard Lizzie yawn behind me. The faster we got this over with, the faster she could get some sleep. I lowered myself down from the fence and joined Lizzie and Callum, wishing we’d stopped in the kitchen to make coffee. The steam drifting from Callum’s teapot smelled like mint and something I didn’t quite recognize. I doubted it contained caffeine.

“There were no gaps in the wards?” Callum asked Lizzie.

She shook her head. “No. Any idea how it got in?”

“They are curious creatures,” Callum said. “And some are resistant to certain forms of magic.”

“So they can really just walk through the wards? Even your wards?” I asked.

The s’ealg oiche fought demons. Their skills at warding were second to none, according to the information I’d found in the Cestis’s Archives. And Callum himself.

“They can get around many things,” Callum said. “We are not entirely sure how. It’s a secret they do not care to share.”

“So you’re telling me anyone could slip a creature into my backyard at any time?” I asked.

Callum shrugged. “The bigger question is how it got out of the realm. They can get through wards, but the door is another matter.”

“Did it say anything when Gráinne brought it back?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Which means it wouldn’t talk to Cerridwen and probably comes from a territory that isn’t necessarily friendly.”

Like Usuriel’s. “She wouldn’t hurt it, would she?”

He shook his head. “No. It didn’t harm anyone, and it isn’t one of ours. She marked it with a charm that should stop it getting through the door again and sent it out of her territory. It can make its own way home. Maybe it slipped through behind someone who didn’t notice. Creatures will get out from time to time.”

The back of my neck prickled. The last time a creature had slipped out of the door, it had been a bruadhsiu, a nightwalker. A nightmare creature feeding on people’s dreams and draining their life force.

We’d killed it in the end, but not before it had done some killing of its own. Damon’s driver, Boyd, had nearly been one of its victims. And we’d never figured out how it had made it through the door.

The nixlings were nothing like nightwalkers, but I’d still prefer it if the Fae could make sure nothing got through their door without permission.

“But it’s more likely someone let it out, right? Do you think someone was trying to send a message?” I asked. “You know, ‘hey, look, we know where you live’.”

Callum grimaced. “Perhaps.”

Was he being diplomatic? It seemed the most likely scenario to me. The Fae were supposed to stay unseen in San Francisco. It was part of the contract they had with the Cestis. They couldn’t harm humans, and they were not allowed to show their true forms if they did get permission to leave the realm. And one day soon, the restrictions on the door would lift. After all, it had been over a year since it had been reestablished, and it seemed to be stable.

But there was dissension among the Fae at the best of times and reopening the door to San Francisco wasn’t a decision all of them supported. It had been necessary to stabilize the realm. but some thought it was too soon to reconnect to the part of the world with the most known demon activity in recent times. It was not much more than a decade since a demon had caused the Big One and less than that since a demon had come for me. The Fae hated demons more than the Cestis did. A demon gaining access to the innate magic of the realm could destroy both the realm and the human world.

“You think Lord Usuriel?”

“He does seem the most likely candidate.” Callum put down his cup with a sigh. “Lord Padran isn’t fond of you, but he doesn’t command nixlings. His realm is mostly water, and nixlings do not love getting wet.”

I pictured the nixling’s fluffy coat. They could probably swim—cats could—but I doubted it would be fun to dry off afterward.

“Will Cerridwen talk to Usuriel?”

Callum poured more tea. “That may depend. Things are still…delicate.”

Confirming what I already knew.

Between rescuing Gwen and crossing Lord Usuriel, I hadn’t made myself any more popular with the members of the Elder Council, who already didn’t like me.

I assumed I wouldn’t be going back into the realm for some time yet, and Callum and Gráinne would train us here. I was happy with that plan. I knew Pinky was, too. She was even less fond of the realm than I was, seeing as technically Cerridwen could command her fealty at any point and put her to work.

But I would have thought a month might start to ease the tension. After all, I hadn’t broken any rules. If anything, Usuriel had. But maybe denting his pride was worse than breaking rules. I’d just have to wait it out until he cooled down. I didn’t exactly miss going into the realm, but I missed Cerridwen’s lessons. I didn’t want to forget the Fae magic I’d fought hard to understand.

But my sense of time wasn’t the same as a Fae’s.

“Alright,” I said. “So is there anything we can do to stop this happening again, or do we have to be on alert for extra weirdness?”

Callum’s mouth quirked. “Gráinne and I can extend the wards, give you more warning if anything of concern approaches the house. Most of the creatures you need to worry about can’t get through wards the way the nixlings can. It would take a great deal of force, the kind that can’t be achieved with stealth and that would be an undeniable breach of the contract. If you come across any of them, well, you know how to defend yourself against demonkind. Most of the things effective against them will work against beings of the realm.”

Mostly the way I killed demonkind was with fire. Callum had made me a far better fighter—though I had a long way to go to get anywhere near as skilled as he or Gráinne were—and Cerridwen had begun teaching me Fae magic to add to my arsenal, but so far I hadn’t mastered anything advanced enough to kill a demon.

“What about bullets?”

His mouth pursed. The Fae, as a rule, didn’t approve of guns. Fair enough when guns were made from iron and steel and so were many of the bullets they fired. Damon had swapped all our ammunition over to steel casing and cores after our first encounters with the Fae. A pure iron bullet would wreck a gun after a few shots, so it was the best we could do. For now.

“A bullet could kill some. Weaken others. Others, you would merely anger unless you have iron ammunition,” Callum said. “In some ways it’s a pity we cannot put on some show of strength to let them know you are not defenseless.”

“Such as?”

He shrugged. “Well, if they sent something more dangerous than a nixling, killing it would have sent a strong message that you are not easy prey.”

“I’m not about to start killing things that haven’t even made a move against me,” I said.

“An admirable position,” Callum replied. “But while the nixling didn’t seek to harm you, locating your house and breaching your wards is a move in itself. Particularly if we are to assume it did not decide to seek you out on its own.”

Apparently he’d come round to my way of thinking.

“So I’m in a game of chicken with an unknown Fae?”

Callum squinted at me. “I fail to see what poultry has to do with it.”

Lizzie snorted. “‘Chicken’ is what we call a dumb game where two people run or drive at each other. The one who gives in first and dodges, loses. It’s epically stupid.”

“Ah. I am familiar with such contests. The Fae know such games of dominance. Though I fail to see why it would be called chicken. Are human fowl particularly cowardly?”

“They’re smart enough to run away, if you charge them,” I said. “That’s not cowardly, that’s just good sense when you’re not a predator.”

“Dumb name for a dumb game,” Lizzie agreed.

“So it seems,” Callum said. “But perhaps the lesson to be had is that in games of dominance, it might be wiser to be the predator than the prey.”