Page 17 of Wicked Deeds

The paparazzi were bad enough, even when I wasn’t doing anything illegal.

The backyard wasn’t much bigger than the front and not much different. The grass was trimmed and the beds planted with the same generic green blob bushes. Zero sign of anyone living in the house.

No shoes at the back door. No kid’s toys or play equipment. No garden tools. No table or chairs on the tiny patio area.

The place felt empty in a vaguely disturbing way.

So much for starting to feel relaxed. Something about the house made my instincts nervous. I looked again for wards, but still nothing. The faintest of gleams on one side of the back door, perhaps. I squinted at it and then decided to leave it to the experts and turned my attention to the battery array.

The control panel was in the usual place. A basic model. Though there were some old screw holes in the wall above it like someone had had a more sophisticated system set up and removed it when they moved out.

I’d grown spoiled living with Damon. I had to remember normal people didn’t know that things that went bump in the night were real, didn’t have to deal with potential kidnappers and crazy fans, and didn’t need twenty-four-hour live monitored security and state-of-the-art vidlinks and house comps.

Most people would put in a security system they could afford and call it a day. This one didn’t even have a palm scan to open the metal control box. It was locked with a padlock.

“This looks easy enough,” I said, waving Lizzie forward.

She took my place, peering at the box, while pulling on a pair of latex gloves. No fingerprints. Right.

“Oh, yeah. I know this kind. Icy.” She produced a set of lockpicks from a pocket inside her jacket and made short work of the padlock. She and Zee had taught me to pick locks when I’d found them practicing one day a few months ago. I could handle basic locks now, but I wasn’t anywhere near as smooth as Lizzie.

She swapped the picks for a penknife one-handed as she flipped open the control panel door, in an impressively well-practiced move. She selected a blade and did something I couldn’t see to the interior of the box. Something else I should ask her to teach me.

“Done. Alarm connection taken care of.” She straightened, closed the panel and replaced the padlock.

“What happens if there’s stuff inside? Valuables or whatever. People might steal it if there’s no alarm?” I asked.

“I’ll ward the control panel and send someone round to fix the connection. No one will even know we were here. Speaking of which.” She paused and dug into yet another pocket. “Gloves.” She passed us each a pair. “No point leaving fingerprints if we can avoid it.”

“Do the gloves not interfere with your magic?” Callum asked, pulling a face as he slid his on.

“Not so far,” Lizzie said. “Though, Maggie, I wouldn’t recommend throwing flame with them on. They might melt. That would be unpleasant.”

Couldn’t argue with that. I pulled on the gloves. “What exactly are we looking for?”

“At a guess, traces of magic,” Lizzie said.

“Your friend didn’t mention giant bugs?”

“No. Lights. Weird vibe. Something setting off her spidey sense, but not giant bugs.”

“Is she the kind of witch who would know what an afrit is if she saw it?”

Lizzie shook her head. “I don’t think so. But a hella big bug would have caught her attention. And if she does know, well, she would have mentioned it.”

“But if there is an afrit?” Fire was the easiest weapon against demonkind. Though starting one inside a building was a bad idea. Fighting Jack’s imps had left me with a shell of burned-out walls instead of a house.

“Let me and Callum take care of it,” Lizzie said.

“And if there’s a silent alarm?”

“Stop worrying so hard. I’ll deal with an alarm if I have to. But I don’t think there is one.”

I hoped not. But she was probably right. The system was cheap and we hadn’t tripped anything so far. It seemed unlikely anyone was monitoring the house. But someone could still show up. It’s not like someone had helpfully invented teleports so a security team could instantly be on-site. After we’d returned from the realm I’d asked Damon if he thought humans might ever invent something close to the Ways the Fae used to cover distances fast, but he’d said he had no idea. Sigh. With all the traveling between San Francisco and Berkeley I did, a teleport would be handy.

But for now I was stuck with commuting, and trusting Lizzie to deal with rent-a-cops if they arrived.

I joined Lizzie at the back door while Callum watched us. There was a palm scan by the door but whatever Lizzie had done had disabled it, too, because it didn’t light up when she waved her hand near the plate. Satisfied, she demonstrated her lockpicking skills yet again and cautiously pushed the door inwards, leaning forward to peer into the darkened hallway. No lights sprang on. So we could rule out a rat or something setting off a sensor light to explain what Lizzie’s friend had seen.

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