Page 3 of Wicked Deeds

Chapter Two

It wasn’tCallum who arrived at Damon’s house thirty minutes later.

The nixling hadn’t moved from the deck, watching me curiously. Callum had instructed me not to let it in and not to try to stop it if it left. I’d told the security detail someone was coming over. They didn’t mention the nixling, which made me wonder if it was using an illusion to hide from the cameras.

Which left me with not much choice but to sit and wait for him to turn up and deal with it.

But it was Gráinne, not Callum, waving at me through the security camera. She’d swapped the black leathers she usually wore in the realm for black jeans and a black leather hoodie. She wasn’t carrying a sword, but I was sure she had plenty of weapons hidden under her clothes. But it was unmistakably her. Black hair braided back from her face, black metal rings in her ears. She was shorter than her twin brother—shorter than me for that matter—but she was as startlingly beautiful as Callum was handsome and her green-gold eyes were the same unusual shade as his.

“Callum sent you?” I asked through the speaker. Since our trek through the realm a month or so ago and my altercation with Usuriel, Lord of the Nichtkin, Cerridwen had started sending Gráinne to assist her brother in his training duties outside the realm. Sometimes they traded off who was in the realm versus out here. And sometimes they were both in San Francisco or Berkeley at the same time. Like tonight.

She nodded. “He was busy.”

That sounded like him. “Come on in.”

The gates swung inward and Gráinne strolled through, looking perfectly at ease. She hadn’t been to Damon’s house before—we’d been meeting at the training gym Damon owned in Berkeley—but she seemed almost as at home in the human world as her brother. Their family worked for Cerridwen—or served, I didn’t know the exact term for the relationship. Their mission was to deal with demons and any other Fae creatures causing problems within the realm or outside of it. But the door to the realm in Berkeley had been closed after the Big One and only recently restored. So the city must have changed since Grainne had last spent much time here. Then again, the decade or so since the earthquake that had levelled parts of San Francisco was a blink of an eye for a Fae.

And Fae were masters at not showing their hand. Playing it cool was their superpower.

I met Gráinne at the door.

“Where is the nixling?” she asked.

Straight to the point. “Out back. There’s a deck attached to the house and it’s sitting there.” Unless it had decided to bolt when I’d left the gym.

“It hasn’t tried to get in?”

“Not so far. It’s watching.”

“They are nosy.” Gráinne glanced right and left, brows drawing down as her eyes narrowed. “And this house is well-warded.”

“It is. But it still got in somehow.”

“Well, they are sneaky as well as nosy. They’re slippery when it comes to wards. After all, it got through the door.”

“Or someone let it out,” I muttered. “If it escaped itself, what’s it doing here? We’re a long way from Berkeley. I doubt it rode the BART.”

“True. But this house also stands out to anyone following the magic in the city, because of the wards.”

“It does?” I blurted, startled. Then felt dumb. Of course it did. To anyone with magic, the warding would be obvious. I didn’t know how much power Cassandra and Lizzie had sunk into the wards, but between them and me and Callum, there was plenty of magic invested in protecting the property.

“I could feel it well before I saw it,” Gráinne said. “But I am Fae. Perhaps to witches, it is not such a distraction. Your magic is strange, after all.”

I bit back the retort that it was Fae magic that was weird, not human. Gráinne was here to help, not get insulted. Fae were prickly beings, quick to take offense at the slightest thing. I had fought beside Gráinne and trained with her, but I’d still only known her a short time. I didn’t know what might upset her.

“So it came to the city somehow and got curious?” On the scale of unlikely coincidences, that one seemed way up there.

Gráinne gave me one of those graceful Fae shrugs her brother was so good at. “Perhaps, rather than talking about it, you take me to the creature and we can find out?”

Best suggestion yet. I wanted the nixling out. Preferably without Damon waking up. He didn’t need yet another piece of Fae weirdness dropped in his lap.

Righteous—as the gamers called his company, Riley Arts—were getting ready to release their newest game at their second annual tournament. Last year’s had been a smash. At least as far as launchingSerenity Fallswas concerned. The game was now one of their biggest sellers. Less good was the part where Jack Miller had wormed himself into the tournament, hoping to carry out some plan we still hadn’t uncovered. We knew part of it was using a method of locking people into a VR environment, overriding the layers and layers of safeguards that had been built in to prevent that very thing. He’d fled after a fight with me and some of the Cestis, which had resulted in my house burning down.

Damon was obsessed with hunting Jack down. Not only for the damage he’d done to us personally, but because he viewed Jack’s corruption of the technology he loved so much as a personal offense. Trying to catch Jack was how we’d ended up in the Fae realm and met a nixling in the first place.

“Inside or outside?” I asked Gráinne.

She grinned. “Outside. A nixling does not pose much threat. They bite, yes, but so do I.”

---