Page 12 of Wicked Deeds

Except for the part where it was hurt, probably. But my skills at healing were limited at best, so I had to take her word for it. Zee wouldn’t take any chances when it came to Lizzie, though, so if he’d cleaned and dressed the wound, it would have been thorough.

“Fine, fine. I’ll stop nagging. I’m sorry Cassandra dragged you out here,” I said with an apologetic grimace.

“Not a problem. It is, after all, my job.”

One of her jobs. Like Aubrey, she was the youngest on the US Cestis; at twenty-three she was eight years younger than Aubrey, who was my age.

But Lizzie wasn’t content with merely helping police the magical world. She also worked part-time at Spark, a charity for kids with troubled backgrounds. She didn’t need to, but if push came to shove, I would bet good money she’d choose helping those kids over the Cestis and magic. They were a cause too close to her heart.

Her father was an exceedingly wealthy man. But also a massively controlling and abusive asshole. He had, thankfully, dropped dead a few years ago.

Lizzie ran away from home at fourteen, somehow ending up in San Francisco, though she’d grown up on the East Coast. She’d lived on the streets, or in squats. Luckily she’d fallen in with a group of guys around her age—including Zee—who had been more interested in gaming than drugs, and the four of them had managed to eke out an existence in game clubs and doing odd jobs for a couple of years until Lizzie had crossed paths with Cassandra, who’d helped them all get back on track.

Cassandra pulled strings so Lizzie got her trust fund early, and her mother added to it after her father died. But, as far asI knew, Lizzie had no other contact with any of her family on either side. She and her mother loved each other, in their way, but the fact her mom had stayed with her dad had fractured their relationship in a way that, so far, Lizzie didn’t seem interested in fixing.

So she knew what the kids she tried to help were going through and gave up time she didn’t really have, to see if she could change their lives the way Cassandra had changed hers.

I was surrounded by a bunch of overly-dedicated-to-their-jobs enthusiasts. Or workaholics to put it bluntly. Not that I was any better. Note to self: make some friends who liked doing things like taking lazy island vacations and brunching and could teach the rest of us how to relax. I didn’t like my chances of meeting anyone like that at Riley or through the Cestis. And I didn’t want to think about island vacations because right now, the main thing islands brought to mind was the damned photograph of my mom and Jack.

Time to work. I needed something to focus on if I wanted to avoid finding the nearest comfortable flat surface and napping.

“Where’s Jake?” I asked Maia. After a night patrolling the garden, he deserved coffee, too.

“He reported in thirty minutes ago and Mitch told him he could go home. There weren’t any more incidents.”

I already knew that. Jake would have raised the alarm if he’d spotted another nixling.

“Maia said you both checked the wards and couldn’t see anything,” Lizzie said, putting down her empty mug with a wistful glance at the coffee machine. Her ‘more coffee will be bad for me later, but I’dreallylike it now’ face. I knew how she felt.

Lizzie had more willpower than me when it came to caffeine, so I restrained myself so I wouldn’t tempt her into another cup. She deserved to sleep well when she finally got to go to bed. “No.Everything looks normal. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.”

“Well, it means nothing else got through them. We need to ask Callum if he has any ideas about how to keep nixlings out, or whether it’s a waste of time trying,” I said.

“Agreed,” Lizzie said. “I’ll go over the wards, so Cassandra is happy, and then you and I can go to Berkeley and see what Callum has to say.” Her hair shimmered as she considered me. “Unless of course you had something else to do this morning?”

Technically I had client work, but it was just data analysis I could run in the background and read the reports later. I had a couple of jobs to finish up before I started my stint working on Damon’s new game. That would keep me busy for a month. I also had to go through my current list of project offers and make sure I had work lined up for when I was done at Righteous. Damon would have happily employed me full-time, but I’d worked too hard at my business to give it up just yet. And sure, ferreting out problems for some of my other clients wasn’t always as fun or cutting edge as working for him, but it was still interesting, and people still wanted my help.

I was hoping Yoshi might have some time to help me out over the summer, before his classes started up again. He always made the workload lighter, but I also wanted him to enjoy his summer vacation time. Like the rest of us, he had workaholic tendencies, between looking after his sister and trying to cram in vacation internships at various tech companies. So I’d have to see what he wanted to do.

“Nothing urgent.” I nodded my head toward the fridge. “Do you want me to help you with the checks, or do I have time for breakfast?”

“Eat. Maia can take me round. She knows the wards as well as we do.”

Well, she knew the witchy parts of them and the ins and outs of the security system. Callum was the one who’d added some additional Fae touches. I knew enough about those to know how to spot a problem, but I didn’t yet know enough Fae magic to alter them myself. Neither did Lizzie, but she might see something I’d missed.

Lizzie was thorough. It was more than an hour before she and Maia came back into the house.

I’d started working but focusing was proving difficult. I kept thinking about the nixling and what it could have wanted.

Not a useful train of thought. I had no way of knowing. I shut down my desk comp when I heard Lizzie’s footsteps coming down the hallway. Maia wore combat boots, too, but hers were military grade and she managed to be stealthy in them. Lizzie stomped cheerfully when she didn’t need to be quiet.

She poked her head through the door. “I didn’t find anything. Let’s talk to Callum.”

Callum was still using my house in Berkeley as a base. Which gave me an excuse to put off making the decision as to whether I was going to keep it or not.

On the one hand, it used to be home. My grandparents’ house, the house where I’d first found a real home when I’d come there after my mother had died. On the other hand, it had been destroyed once in the Big One and then again by Jack. I’d rebuilt it twice now and with each passing week it felt a little bit farther away from my memories and a little bit harder to justify why I was keeping it when I was basically living at Damon’s.

Still, I didn’t have to make my decision while it offered a handy base for Callum and Gráinne when they were training meor doing whatever arcane Fae things Cerridwen set them to do in the city.

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