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“Aye, guessing so.”
Rick stood up, too. “Hey, do you need me back tomorrow night? Or . . .’
Terrible’s eyebrows rose. “You wa
“Well . . .” Did he? No, not really. But he still needed the money, and he didn’t think he’d actually earned anything yet.
Terrible reached into the heavy pack against the wall and pulled out a wad of cash. “Here. You take this, aye? An’ you ain’t needing to come back. Thinkin’ you done enough.”
He held out his hand. Or rather, he held out a bunch of money, what had to be at least three or four grand.
“Oh, hey, no, I mean, I hardly did anything, the floorboards aren’t even up at all.”
Terrible glanced at Chess, then back. “Take it.”
“But I—”
“Take it.”
So he did, shoving it into his pocket without counting it. At least he knew not to do that.
He slung his backpack over his still-sore shoulder, and the three of them clattered back down the stairs and out the front door.
Down the street a gang of kids were giggling and playing with firecrackers. On the corner a couple of hookers leaned against the lamppost, their skin glistening with sweat. The sound of breaking glass echoed over the other noises, the car engines and shouts and music.
“Well, okay, I guess,” Rick said. He held out his hand to Chess, who shook it, then he did the same with Terrible. “It was nice meeting you guys and everything.”
“You, too,” Chess replied. “Take care.”
Terrible grunted.
“Oh, and thanks,” she said. “You were a big help . . . you were really brave.”
Brave. Was he? He didn’t feel like he was, hadn’t felt it at the time, but when he looked back at what he’d done . . . yeah, maybe he was. His chest inflated.
But he didn’t let on how that made him feel. Instead he just said, “Bye,” and walked to his car, aware of their eyes on him, aware of the dark sky above and the city of ghosts beneath the earth. He’d seen it. He’d actually seen the City, he’d actually seen ghosts, been injured by them and watched them be defeated.
He was Rick the Brave, Rick the ghost killer. Rick the guy any girl would want to be with, and he was four grand or so richer, and life was pretty damn good, after all.
Full-Scale Demolition
SUZANNE MCLEOD
“The client’s got a pixie portal in her swimming pool?” I groaned and shot a frustrated look down at the four Warded cat carriers I’d tucked into the shade of Nelson’s Column. There were two sleeping pixies in each and it had taken me since dawn to catch the little monsters. It was now midday. The last thing I wanted was another pixie job. “Toni, please, ple-ease, tell me this is one of your windups?”
Toni, our office manager, laughed in my phone’s earpiece. “Sorry, not this time, Ge
Catching pixies was sonot my favorite job. It made me feel like the wicked faerie who didn’t get invited to the christening, but who turned up anyway. And catching pixies in Trafalgar Square on Easter Saturday, in an early heat wave, with a full complement of tourists, schoolkids, and al fresco sandwich-snackers happily pointing their digital cameras and video phones my way . . .
Well, you get the picture.
I raked fingers through the ends of my hair where it stuck to my nape and contemplated the last pixie. It was squatting on the flank of one of the four bronze lions that guarded the base of Nelson’s Column, swishing its barbed tail like an angry cat. Its blue-gray scales shimmered in the sunlight, and its lipless snout was stretched in a taunting grin. No way was it going to make this easy. Then, as if to hammer that thought home, the pixie flapped its vestigial batlike wings, cartwheeled along the lion’s broad back, and jumped up to perch on the statue’s huge head.
The impromptu audience gathered below laughed and clapped and whooped. The two heritage wardens, who were doing crowd control around the column’s base, exchanged a long-suffering look. And in the background the ever-present rumble of traffic rose and fell like the murmur of the sea. Which was where the pixie was going back to after I’d caught it in my hot sticky fingers.
Despite the fascinated audience, pixies in Trafalgar Square were nothing new. The first one appeared back in 1845 as soon as they’d begun pumping water into the newly built fountains—the fountains had opened a portal straight to the Cornish sea—and the pixies had been slipping through ever since. A cautionary lesson to anyone thinking about digging a new garden pond. Get a witch to do a magical survey first, or you never know where you might be co
“Ge
At my shouted name, I looked down to find a petite girl of about my own age—twenty-four—at the front of the crowd. She had spiky black hair, a silver dumbbell through her left eyebrow, and a tattoo of red and black triangles on the side of her throat, and she was overdressed for the heat wave in Goth-style camo gear. She gri
I shifted, giving her my back.
“Hi, hon.” Toni’s voice returned in my earpiece.
“What’s the story with the swimming pool anyway?” I asked.
“The client’s doing renovations,” Toni said. “One of the builders put an iron spike through the Ground Ward and fritzed it, and then some idiot left a hose ru
“Great.” Repairing a Ground Ward added another hour to the job.
“Oh, wait till you hear the rest,” Toni said. “The husband’s an antiquities dealer, so the house is full of statues. Very old and very expensive statues. Hubby’s on a buying trip just now, and the client’s having forty fits in case something ends up broken.”
Pixies love statues. It’s what makes them dangerous.
A few years ago, a pack of about thirty-odd pixies, high on candies filched from a coachload of schoolkids (sugar works wonders for amping up magic), managed to partially animate the exact same bronze lion I was looking at. The lion shook its head, roared, and snapped its jaws at the crowd for over an hour before the pixies’ magic finally wore off. So the Greater London Authority declared the pixies a health hazard, and Spellcrackers. com had won the contract to keep the pixie numbers down to acceptable levels.
“Thing is,” Toni said, breaking into my musings, “you’ll need to do the job on your own; everyone else is either down at Old Scotland Yard—” She paused, and we shared a moment’s silence about the tragedy, currently absorbing the media, of the two eleven-year-old boys who’d gone missing from an amusement arcade a week ago. Any witch with a touch of scrying ability was helping the police right now. So far no one had gotten lucky. “Or they’re off to the Spring Fertility Rite,” Toni finished. Easter is the witches’ big jamboree.
“No probs. Does the client know I’m doing the job?” Some humans didn’t want a fae in their home—either too scared or too bigoted—and while I can pass for human if I hide my catlike pupils, it’s never good business to fool the clients. Of course, I get other job requests that have nothing to do with crackingmagic and everything to do with some jerk’s sexual fantasy, so I find it pays to check.
“She asked for our pixie specialist.” Which was my “star billing” on the company website. “Plus I told her, but she’s worried enough that the Wicked Witch of the West could turn up on her doorstep and it wouldn’t be an issue.”