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“Love you, too, Toni,” I said drily, digging the Pixnap—my favorite pixie-sedating cream—from my backpack.
She laughed. “Oh, and stay out of my stationery cupboard until you’ve gotten rid of all that pixie dust.”
“Hey, that was an accident,” I said in mock affront, rubbing the honeyscented cream into my hands and forearms. “And I tidied all your pens after they’d finished doing the tango.”
“Pixing my face wasn’t an accident.” Toni didn’t mean herface, but the Green Man plaque hanging behind our reception desk. I’d been experimenting with pixie dust, and animated him. Trouble was, he’d been carved from a dryad’s tree, and the pixie magic was taking its time wearing off. “He still winks every time I walk by,” she said in disgust.
“Sorry.” I stifled a chuckle. “At least he’s stopped telling everyone to come back tomorrow.”
She huffed, told me that she’d e-mail me the client’s details, and we said our good-byes.
I turned my attention back to the pixie, who was doing a furious jig on the lion’s head, and hauled myself up onto the bronze lion. Its metal back was scorching from the sun, and gritty from all the pixie dust. It really was way too hot for this. My Lycra ru
“C’mon, little pixie,” I murmured, sliding my cream-covered hand up the lion’s metal mane. “Playtime’s over. Time to go home.”
The pixie’s snout peeled back to showcase a row of chitinous teeth, and warning clicks issued from its throat as it maniacally shook its head. I don’t speak pixie, but its meaning was pretty clear—
“Back off, my bite’s nastier than yours.”
“Yeah, don’t I know it,” I muttered.
And out the corner of my eye I saw Tavish’s broad shoulders shake with mirth. He was standing, well, posing really, on the fountain’s highest bowl, which put him about twenty feet up, so I could hardly miss him. And if that weren’t enough, he’d bespelled the water so it cascaded over him like a cloak of sun-trapped diamonds, making him look like some gorgeous, hedonistic river god. But then he was a kelpie, so the look was apt, even if his black cargo shorts sort of ruined it. Still, at least he waswearing shorts, and was in his human shape, so I counted that as a win.
I glared over at him. He gave me a happy thumbs-up, and the beads threading his long dreads flashed from silver to a gleaming turquoise. I glared harder. Bad enough having an audience without being critiqued by another fae, however hot he was. Though to be fair, Tavish didn’t work for Spellcrackers, but he’d still offered to help when he’d strolled into the square five minutes after I’d arrived. I almost hadn’t been surprised. He’d been turning up more and more on my outside jobs. If he’d been human I’d have expected the date question—hell, I was more than interested enough that if he’d been human I wouldn’t have waited for him to ask. But he was wylde fae, likely older than the last mille
The crowd whooped, drawing my attention back to the pixie, who was now striking muscleman poses. I inched my hand closer. The pixie tensed, webbed feet gripping the hot metal as it unfurled its useless wings. I froze. I hadn’t safely caught all its pals to have this last one do itself an injury because I’d spooked it. After a moment, its wings dropped, and, holding my breath, I made a grab for its nearest limb, relieved as my fingers closed around its scaly left leg. It let out an ear-piercing screech that almost drowned out the crowd’s disappointed boos, then mercifully went quiet as it sniffed the honey in the Pixnap and sank its teeth into my forearm. Gritting my own teeth against the dull pain, and carefully cradling the suddenly dozy pixie, I slid off the bronze lion and tucked the pixie in with its pals.
Now for the cleanup.
I opened the metaphysical part of me that can seethe magic and looked. Almost everything in the square, including some of the audience, lit up as if it had been scattered with multicolored sugar sprinkles: pixie dust. Some of the dust was old and faint, some brighter and more recent. Cleaning this up was one of the reasons why I’d gotten the job at Spellcrackers despite my lack of spell- castingability. (The other was my dubious celebrity quality.) It would take a coven of witches a good four or five hours to callall the pixie dust and neutralizeit. And they’d have to enclose Trafalgar Square in a circle to do it. Way too expensive. The other, quicker way would be to crackthe dust, but crackingmagic doesn’t just destroy the spell, and pitted bronze lions, broken pavement, and exploding pixies weren’t included in the contract. Whereas I could do my party trick: suck the dust up like a magical vacuum cleaner, and neutralizeit back at the office.
I sat and made myself comfortable next to the cat carriers, then dug out a spell-crystal and some licorice torpedoes from my backpack. Chewing on the candy for a quick magical boost, I activated the Look-Away veil in the crystal . . .
And calledthe pixie dust.
It flew to me like iron filings to a magnet, clumping in colorful patches on my skin. The patches rustled and tickled like dry grass in a wind. Weird, but not entirely unpleasant. But then the not-so-fun part kicked in: the pixie-dust sprinkles twisted into tiny fishhooks that pierced my flesh painlessly and jerked my limbs around as if I were a disjointed marionette. To anyone who couldn’t see, I probably looked like I was convulsing. The usual nausea roiled in my stomach, and I closed my eyes, concentrating on straightening the hooks and dropping them into the metaphysical bag inside me.
“Well now, doll, that’s as fine a sight as any I’ve seen for a long while.” Tavish’s soft burr snapped my head up.
He was crouched next to me, appreciation in the solid pewter color of his eyes. Apart from his Roman-straight nose, his long, angular features weren’t classically handsome, but he was striking, and captivating, and alluring. Though, caution warned me, a lot of his allure was probably down to his kelpie Charm.
I scowled and pushed my sweaty hair back from my face. “Tavish, I look like something the cat’s dragged in after a fight with birthday cake.”
He blinked, his eyes changing from pewter to a pale, translucent blue, and then he gave me a lingering head-to-toe assessment. “Aye, doll, so you do,” he agreed prosaically, the delicate black-lace gills on either side of his neck fa
Kelpies are soul-tasters; they taste the souls of those who are dying. Of course sometimes the souls aren’t actually dying until after the kelpie has Charmed them into the water. But Tavish abides by River Lore—has done so for a couple of hundred years—so he no longer Charms humans into the Thames, and of those he finds in the river, he tastes only those who have killed or want to die.
“Great,” I said, unsure whether to be pleased my soul looked pretty (although maybe that should be tasty), or irrationally a
“Nae problem, doll.” He grasped my hand and pulled me up hard enough that my nose ended up pressed against his neck. I sucked in a startled breath. Boy, did he smell good: like oranges and peat-mellowed whisky. And his pulse was thudding temptingly close under the hot smooth skin of his throat. I almost succumbed to an urge to lick it, but my sensible head took charge, and reluctantly I pushed him back. He gave me a satisfied look, as if he knew exactly what I’d been thinking, but as I narrowed my gaze, his forehead creased in concern and he said, “I heard a lassie shouting for you from the crowd, was there maybe some trouble or t’other I couldnae see?”