Page 62 of The Mermaid's Bubble Lounge
Grim finally looked over his shoulder at Dave. “’Tweren’t like that.” He turned back to me. “No one’s checking up on you. I’m more like a phone, but slower. If you wanted to get a message to the queen, you could go through me. The same is true in reverse. If she wants you to know something, you can get the information through me. That’s all. No one’s asking me to pass on secrets. It’s more that I’m ready if you need me.”
“That was why you went with me when I had to travel into Faerie last year?” I ventured.
“Aye. Liam, Maggie, and me. Though in Liam and Maggie’s cases, they were just doing it to look after you. I’m the only one who agreed to take on the role.” Hands on his hips, he scowled at me. “None of this is here nor there. Algar needs to know we have a pooka.”
“My dad already passed it on,” Meri told him.
Grim turned his attention to her and then flicked his gaze out the window, where Meri’s dad was watching us. “Who did he tell?”
She glanced at her dad and gave him a big, fake smile and a wave. “Everybody smile at my dad,” she hissed, and we did. “He was already worried about me before I started asking about pookas.”
“If he’s here, how did he let Algar know?” Grim wore a pained grimace, which seemed to be as close to a smile as he could get.
“There’s a spot nearby, at the bottom of the bay, that’s a doorway into Faerie,” she said.
Dave, Grim, and I all looked at each other with mirroring expressions of what the fuck?
“Wait. Has that always been there?” I asked. Maybe that was where the kelpies that hated me kept coming from. I turned to Liam and Dermot. “Did you two know that?”
They nodded. “There are a lot of water fae here because of it,” Liam explained.
“I thought the Wicche Glass Tavern was the closest doorway. You’re telling me I built my bookstore and bar over a doorway?” I started to rub my hands over my face and then remembered the axe. I swung it over my shoulder and replaced it in its sheath.
“Don’t put it away,” Grim scolded. “We need to check for the pooka.”
“Who are we checking?” I countered. “All the fae in the room have proven who they are and my touching my axe to a wicche isn’t going to do anything to them.”
“I already checked,” Dave said. “Everybody is who they seem to be.”
“Okay. First thing’s first,” I said, walking behind the bar and placing my hand on the wall. “Let me fix the ward.”
I closed my eyes, unspooling my magic like a long gold thread in my chest. I mentally wrapped it around the hand touching the wall and thought, I, Sam Quinn, key to the ward on The Slaughtered Lamb, ask that pookas, no matter what or who they look like, be barred from entering. Whether by the stairs, the water, or the air, no pooka shall pass my ward and enter. I felt a pull on my arm as my magic traveled through the walls, floors, ceilings, and windows, locking us away and keeping us safe.
When I opened my eyes, I found Dave watching me. “I’d already put a demon ward on the place when I heard we had one.”
“Thank you.” Our voices were both quiet. Regardless of our standing in a room of a dozen people, we were only talking to one another. I’d once thought of Dave as my most trusted and beloved grumpy uncle. Some hard truths had been learned recently, and we were now uncomfortably cautious with one another. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. I’d trust him with my life. It was more that I was struggling with grief and disillusionment. I knew he was trying, and he knew I was too. Forgiveness over my mother’s dead body was proving difficult for me.
“I know,” he said softly.
“Well, why the devil didn’t you tell us from the start you’d already warded against them?” Grim grumbled, climbing back up on his stool and taking a gulp of mead.
“Okay, but, Sam, I still have something to tell you,” Meri said.
I turned to her. “Right. I’m sorry.”
“Dad did some investigating.” Her voice was low. Dave and the fae could still hear her, but the wicches, who didn’t have sensitive hearing, went back to their own conversations. “He said that the merfolk at the wharf have been feeling something off. They hadn’t seen the pooka, but when my dad asked about one, it made them realize that must have been what they were feeling. They’re pretty nervous. Pookas don’t care for water fae.
“My aunt Nerissa started closing the club early the last couple of days because all my cousins were feeling super creeped out at work. When they leave at the end of the night—if they’re not returning to the ocean—they walk together in a group to their cars.”
“Do you know,” I asked, “is there a doorway to Faerie at The Bubble Lounge?”
Meri glanced at Grim and then lowered her voice even more. “There’s not supposed to be one there, but a couple of my cousins said they felt a pull into the other realm more strongly in the last few months.”
“Do they know where it is?” Maybe someone could close it.
“Um.” She coiled her long blonde hair around her nervous fingers. “They think it’s the glass ceiling that your cousin Arwyn made. They said they sometimes hear the high-pitched buzzing voices of the flower fairies and smell the blooms that grow along the riverbanks in Faerie when they are in a back corner of the club. No one has tried to jump up, touch the glass ceiling, and test the theory, though. When they have to clean in that corner, they do it quickly and go. Auntie Nerissa even moved the tables so no one has to serve in that area.”
I rubbed my forehead. This was crazy. “There’s no way Arwyn did that on purpose.”
