Storm Born. Richelle Mead

property.”

      With a few grumbles, he paid up—in cash—and I left. Really, though, he was so stoked about the shoe, I probably could have decimated the office.

      In my car, I dug out a Milky Way from the stash in my glove box. Battles like that required immediate sugar and calories. As I practically shoved the candy bar into my mouth, I turned on my cell phone. I had a missed call from Lara.

      Once I’d consumed a second bar and was on I-10 back to Tucson, I dialed her.

      “Yo,” I said.

      “Hey. Did you finish the Montgomery job?”

      “Yup.”

      “Was the shoe really possessed?”

      “Yup.”

      “Huh. Who knew? That’s kind of funny too. Like, you know, lost souls and soles in shoes…”

      “Bad, very bad,” I chastised. Lara might be a good secretary, but there was only so much I could be expected to put up with. “So what’s up? Or were you just checking in?”

      “No. I just got a weird job offer. Some guy—well, honestly, I thought he sounded kind of schizo. But he claims his sister was abducted by fairies, er, gentry. He wants you to go get her.”

      I fell silent at that, staring at the highway and clear blue sky ahead without consciously seeing either one. Some objective part of me attempted to process what she had just said. I didn’t get that kind of request very often. Okay, never. A retrieval like that required me to cross over physically into the Otherworld. “I don’t really do that.”

      “That’s what I told him.” But there was uncertainty in Lara’s voice.

      “Okay. What aren’t you telling me?”

      “Nothing, I guess. I don’t know. It’s just…he said she’s been gone almost a year and a half now. She was fourteen when she disappeared.”

      My stomach sank a little at that. God. What an awful fate for someone so young. It made the keres’ lewd comments to me downright trivial.

      “He sounded pretty frantic.”

      “Does he have proof she was actually taken?”

      “I don’t know. He wouldn’t get into it. He was kind of paranoid. Seemed to think his phone was being tapped.”

      I laughed at that. “By who? The gentry?” “Gentry” was what I called the beings that most of Western culture referred to as fairies or sidhe. They looked just like humans but embraced magic instead of technology. They found “fairy” a derogatory term, so I respected that—sort of—by using the term old English peasants used to use. Gentry. Good folk. Good neighbors. A questionable designation, at best. The gentry actually preferred the term “shining ones,” but that was just silly. I wouldn’t give them that much credit.

      “I don’t know,” Lara told me. “Like I said, he seemed a little schizo.”

      Silence fell as I held on to the phone and passed a car driving 45 in the left lane.

      “Eugenie! You aren’t really thinking of doing this.”

      “Fourteen, huh?”

      “You always said that was dangerous.”

      “Adolescence?”

      “Stop it. You know what I mean. Crossing over.”

      “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

      It was dangerous—super dangerous. Traveling in spirit form could still get you killed, but your odds of fleeing back to your earthbound body were better. Take your own body over, and all the rules changed.

      “This is crazy.”

      “Set it up,” I told her. “It can’t hurt to talk to him.”

      I could practically see her biting her lip to hold back protests. But at the end of the day, I was the one who signed her paychecks, and she respected that. After a few moments, she filled the silence with info about a few other jobs and then drifted on to more casual topics: some sale at the mall, a mysterious scratch on her car…

      Something about Lara’s cheery gossip always made me smile, but it also disturbed me that most of my social contact came via someone I never actually saw. Lately the majority of my face-to-face interactions came from spirits and gentry.

      It was after dinnertime when I arrived home, and my housemate, Tim, appeared to be out for the night, probably at a poetry reading. Despite a Polish background, genes had inexplicably given him a strong Native American appearance. In fact, he looked more Indian than some of the locals. Deciding this was his claim to fame, Tim had grown his hair out and taken on the name Timothy Red Horse. He made his living by reading faux-Native poetry at local dives and wooing naive tourist women by using expressions like “my people” and “the Great Spirit” a lot. It was despicable, to say the least, but it got him laid pretty often. What it did not do was bring in a lot of money, so I’d let him live with me in exchange for housework and cleaning. It was a pretty good deal as far as I was concerned. After battling the undead all day, scrubbing the bathtub just seemed like asking too much.

      Scrubbing my athames, unfortunately, was a task I had to do myself. Keres blood could stain.

      I ate dinner afterward, then stripped and sat in my sauna for a long time. I liked a lot of things about my little house out in the foothills, but the sauna was one of my favorites. It might seem kind of pointless in the desert, but Arizona had mostly dry heat, and I liked the feel of humidity and moisture on my skin. I leaned back against the wooden wall, enjoying the sensation of sweating out the stress. My body ached—some parts more fiercely than others—and the heat let some of the muscles loosen up.

      The solitude also soothed me. Pathetic as it was, I probably had no one to blame for my lack of sociability except myself. I spent a lot of time alone and didn’t mind. When my stepfather, Roland, had first trained me as a shaman, he’d told me that in a lot of cultures, shamans essentially lived outside of normal society. The idea had seemed crazy to me at the time, being in junior high, but it made more sense now that I was older.

      I wasn’t a complete socialphobe, but I found I often had a hard time interacting with other people. Talking in front of groups was murder. Even talking one-on-one had its issues. I had no pets or children to ramble on about, and I couldn’t exactly talk about things like the incident in Las Cruces. Yeah, I had kind of a long day. Drove four hours, fought an ancient minion of evil. After a few bullets and knife wounds, I obliterated him and sent him on to the world of death. God, I swear I’m not getting paid enough for this crap, you know? Cue polite laughter.

      When I left the sauna, I had another message from Lara telling me the appointment with the distraught brother had been arranged for tomorrow. I made a note in my day planner, took a shower, and retired to my room, where I threw on black silk pajamas. For whatever reason, nice pajamas were the one indulgence I allowed myself in an otherwise dirty and bloody lifestyle. Tonight’s selection had a cami top that showed serious cleavage, had anyone been there to see it. I always wore a ratty robe around Tim.

      Sitting at my desk, I emptied out a new jigsaw puzzle I’d just bought. It depicted a kitten on its back clutching a ball of yarn. My love of puzzles ranked up there with the pajama thing for weirdness, but they eased my mind. Maybe it was the fact that they were so tangible. You could hold the pieces in your hand and make them fit together, as opposed to the insubstantial stuff I usually worked with.

      While my hands moved the pieces around, I kept trying to shake the knowledge that the keres had known my name. What did that mean? I’d made a lot of enemies in the Otherworld. I didn’t like the thought of them being able to track me personally. I preferred to stay Odile. Anonymous. Safe. Probably not much point worrying about it, I supposed. The keres was dead. He wouldn’t be telling any tales.

      Two hours later, I finished the puzzle and admired it. The kitten had brown tabby fur, its eyes an almost azure blue. The yarn was