Thorn Queen. Richelle Mead

“Trust me. I’ve seen this lots of times.”

      “So…isn’t there anything you can do? Anything we can do?”

      “Therapy,” I suggested. “Maybe get a psychic to come out.”

      I gave Mrs. Hall the contact information for a psychic I trusted. Waiving my banishing fee, I simply charged her for the house call. Once I’d double-checked the cash she gave me—I never took checks—I stashed it away and made moves toward the living-room door.

      “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”

      “No, I mean, I guess this helps. It’s just so strange.” She eyed her daughter with perplexity. “Are you sure it’s not a ghost?”

      “Positive. These are classic symp—”

      An invisible force slammed into me, pushing me into the wall. I yelped, threw out a hand to keep my balance, and shot daggers at that little bitch Polly. Eyes wide, she looked just as astonished as I felt.

      “Polly!” exclaimed Mrs. Hall. “You are grounded, young lady. No phone, no IM, no…” Her mouth dropped open as she stared at something across the room. “What’s that?”

      I followed her gaze to the large, pale blue shape materializing before us.

      “Um, well,” I said, “that’s a ghost.”

      It swooped toward me, mouth open in a terrible screech. I yelled for the others to get down and jerked a silver-bladed athame out of my belt. A knife might seem useless against spirits, but they needed to take on a substantial form to inflict any real damage. Once solid, they were susceptible to silver.

      This spirit bore a female shape—a very young female shape, actually. Long pale hair trailed in her wake like a cloak, and her eyes were large and empty. Whether it was a lack of experience or simply some inherent trait of hers, her attack proved floundering and uncoordinated. Even as she screamed at the first bites of the athame, I had my crystal-studded wand out in my other hand.

      Now that I’d regained my bearings, I could do a banishing like this in my sleep. Speaking the usual words, I drew from my internal strength and sent my own spirit beyond the boundaries of this world. Touching the gates of the Underworld, I ensnared the female spirit and sent her over. Monsters and gentry I tended to send back to the Otherworld, the limbo they lived in. A ghost like this needed to move on to the land of death. She disappeared.

      Mrs. Hall and Polly stared at me. Suddenly, in her first show of emotion, the girl leapt up and glared at me.

      “You just killed my best friend!”

      I opened my mouth to respond and decided nothing I had to say would be adequate.

      “Good heavens, what are you talking about?” exclaimed her mother.

      Polly’s face twisted with anger, her eyes bright with tears. “Trixie. She was my best friend. We told each other everything.”

      “Trixie?” Mrs. Hall and I asked in unison.

      “I can’t believe you did that. She was so cool.” Polly’s voice turned a little wistful. “I just wish we could have gone shopping together, but she couldn’t leave the house. So I just had to bring her Vogue and Glamour.”

      I turned to Mrs. Hall. “My original advice still stands. Therapy. Lots of it.”

      I headed home after that, wondering for the hundredth time why I’d chosen this mercenary shaman profession. Surely there were other jobs that were a lot less trouble than interacting with evil supernatural beings. Accounting. Advertising. Law. Well, maybe not that last one.

      About an hour later, I arrived back home and was immediately assaulted by two medium-sized dogs when I cleared the door. They were mutts, one solid black and one solid white. Their names were Yin and Yang, but I could never remember who was who.

      “Back off,” I warned as they sniffed me, tails wagging frantically. The white one tried to lick my hand. Pushing past them, I entered my kitchen and nearly tripped over a tabby cat sprawled on the floor in a patch of sun. Grumbling, I tossed my bag onto the kitchen table. “Tim? Are you here?”

      My housemate, Tim Warkoski, stuck his head into the kitchen. He wore a T-shirt with silhouettes of Native Americans that said Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1492. I appreciated the cleverness, but it lost something since Tim wasn’t actually an American Indian. He merely played one on TV, or rather, he played one in local bars and tourist circles, using his tanned skin and black hair to elude his Polish heritage. It had gotten him into trouble with a lot of the local tribes.

      With a garbage bag in one hand and a cat scoop in the other, he gave me a dark look. “Do you know how many fucking boxes of litter I’ve had to change today?”

      I poured a glass of milk and sat down at the table. “Kiyo says we need one box for every cat and then an extra one.”

      “Yeah, I can count, Eugenie. That’s six boxes. Six boxes in a house with fifteen hundred square feet. You think your deadbeat boyfriend’s ever going to show back up and help out with this?”

      I shifted uncomfortably. It was a good question. After three months of dating between Tucson and Phoenix, my boyfriend Kiyo had decided to take a job here to save the hour and a half commute. We’d had a long discussion and decided we were ready to have him simply move in with me. Unfortunately, with Kiyo came his menagerie: five cats and two dogs. It was one of the woes of dating a veterinarian. He couldn’t help but adopt every animal he found. I couldn’t remember the cats’ names any better than the dogs’. Four of them were named after the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and all I could really recall was that Famine ironically weighed about thirty pounds.

      Another problem was that Kiyo was a fox—both literally and figuratively. His mother was a kitsune, a sort of Japanese fox spirit. He’d inherited all of her traits, including amazing strength and speed, as well as the ability to transform into an actual fox. As a result, he frequently got “the call of the wild,” making him yearn to run around in his animal form. Since he had downtime between jobs now, he’d left me to take a kind of wild vacation. I accepted this, but after a week of not seeing him, I was starting to get restless.

      “He’ll be back soon,” I said vaguely, not meeting Tim’s eyes. “Besides, you can get out of chores if you want to start paying rent.” That was our deal. Free lodging in exchange for food and housework.

      He wasn’t deterred. “Your choice in men is questionable. You know that, right?”

      I didn’t really want to ponder that too much. I abandoned him for my room, seeking the comfort of a jigsaw puzzle depicting a photograph of Zurich. It sat on my desk, as did one of the cats. I think he was Mr. Whiskers, the non-Apocalyptic one. I shooed him off the puzzle. He took about half the pieces with him.

      “Fucking cat,” I muttered.

      Love, I decided, was a hard thing. Well aware of my grumpy mood, I knew part of my anxiety over Kiyo stemmed from the fact that he was also passing part of his sabbatical in the Otherworld, spending time with his ex-girlfriend who just happened to be a devastatingly beautiful fairy queen. Fairies, sidhe, shining ones…whatever you wanted to call them, they were the tall, long-lived rulers of the Otherworld. Most shamans and I referred to them as gentry, an antique term. Maiwenn, Kiyo’s ex, was almost nine months pregnant, and although they’d broken up, he was still a part of her life.

      I sighed. Tim might have been right about my questionable taste in men.

      Night wore on. I finished the puzzle while blasting Def Leppard, making me feel better. I was just shutting off the music when I heard Tim yell, “Yo, Eug. Kujo’s here.”

      Breathless, I ran to my bedroom door and flung it open. A red fox the size of a wolf trotted down the hall toward me. Relief burned through me, and I felt my heart soar as I let him in and watched him pace around in restless circles.

      “About time,” I said.

      He had a sleek