Small Favor

"Metaphorically speaking," I said tiredly.

"You know what I mean."

"He’s under a geas, Thomas."

Thomas frowned. "Lily’s got him in a brain-lock?"

"I doubt she’d do that to Fix. They go back."

"Who, then?"

"My money is on Titania, the Summer Queen. If she told him to keep his mouth shut and not to help me, he wouldn’t get a choice in the matter. Probably why he showed up armed and tried to intimidate me. He wouldn’t be able to speak to me outright, but if he’s delivering a threat in order to further Titania’s plans, it might let him get around the geas."

"Seems pretty thin to me. You believe him?"

"Titania’s done it to him before. And she doesn’t really like me."

"You kill someone’s daughter, that happens," he said.

I shrugged wearily, tired to my bones. The combination of pain, cold, and multiple bursts of adrenaline had worn me down a lot more than I had realized. I couldn’t stop another yawn.

"What was he talking about as we pulled out?"

"Oh," I mumbled. "After that mess at Arctis Tor, Lily gave me a silver pin in the shape of an oak leaf. It makes me an Esquire of Summer. Supposedly I can use it to whistle up help from Titania’s Court. It’s their way of balancing the scales for what we did."

"Never a bad thing to be owed a favor," Thomas agreed. "You got it on you?"

"Yeah," I said. It was, in fact, in a little ring box within the inner coat of my duster. I got it out and showed it to Thomas.

He whistled. "Gorgeous work."

"The Sidhe know pretty," I agreed.

"Maybe you can use it and get them to back off."

I snorted. "It’s never that simple. Titania could decide that the best way to help me would be to break my back, paralyze me from the waist down, and dump me into a hospital bed so her gruffs won’t have to kill me."

Thomas grunted. "Then why would Fix mention it?"

"Maybe he was compelled to," I said. "Maybe Titania’s hoping I’ll call for help and she’ll have a chance to squash me personally. Or maybe…"

I let my voice trail off for a moment, while I kicked my punch-drunk brain in the stomach until it threw up an idea.

"Or maybe," I said, "because he wanted to warn me about it. The gruffs have found me twice now, and they haven’t been physically tailing or tracking me. Neither location was one of my regular hangouts. And how did Fix find me just now, in the middle of a blizzard? He sure as hell didn’t coincidentally pick a random IHOP."

Thomas’s eyes widened in realization. "It’s a tracking device."

I scowled at the beautiful little silver leaf and said, not without a certain amount of grudging admiration, "Titania. That conniving bitch."

"Damn," Thomas said. "I feel a little bad for pointing a gun at the shrimp, now."

"I probably would, too," I said, "if I wasn’t so weirded out by the fact that Fix is starting to be as crabwise and squirrelly as the rest of the Sidhe."

Thomas grunted. "Better get rid of that thing before more of them show up."

He hit the control that lowered the passenger window. It coughed and rattled a little before it jerked into motion, instead of smoothly gliding down. Wizards and technology don’t get along so well. To high-tech equipment I am the living avatar of Murphy’s Law: The longer I stayed in Thomas’s shiny new oil tanker, the more all the things that could go wrong, would go wrong.

I lifted the leaf to chuck it out, but something made me hesitate. "No," I murmured.

Thomas blinked. "No?"

"No," I said with more certainty, closing my hand around the treacherous silver leaf. "I’ve got a better idea."

Chapter Ten

I finished the spell that I thought would keep the gruffs busy and climbed wearily out of my lab to find Thomas sitting by the fireplace. My big grey dog, Mouse, lay beside him, his fur reflecting highlights of reddened silver in the firelight, watching Thomas’s work with interest.

My brother sat cross-legged on the floor, with my gun lying disassembled on a soft leather cloth upon the hearth. He frowned in concentration as he cleaned the pieces of the weapon with a brush, a soft cloth, and a small bottle of oil.

Mister, my hyperthyroid tomcat, bounded over the minute I opened the trapdoor to the lab, and hurried down the folding staircase into the subbasement.

"Go get ’em, tiger," I muttered after him by way of encouragement. "Make them run their little hooves off."

I left the door open, heaved myself to the couch, and collapsed. Mouse’s tail thumped the floor gently.

"You all right?" Thomas asked.

"Tired," I said. "Big spell."

"Uh-huh," he said, working industriously on the weapon’s barrel. "What building did you burn down?"

"Your apartment, if you don’t lay off the wiseass commentary," I said. "Give me a minute and we’ll get moving."

Thomas gave me a sidelong, calculating look. "I needed another minute or two anyway. When’s the last time you cleaned this thing?"

"Uh. Who’s the president now?"

Thomas clucked his teeth in disapproval and returned to the gun. "Let me know when you’re ready."

"Just give me a minute to catch my breath," I said.

When I woke up there was dim light coming from my mostly buried basement windows, and my neck felt like the bones had been welded together by a badly trained contractor. The various beatings I’d received the night before had formed a corporation and were attempting a hostile takeover of my nervous system. I groaned and looked around.

Thomas was sitting with his back against the wall beside the fireplace, as relaxed and patient as any tiger. His gun, mine, and the bent-bladed kukri knife he’d favored lately lay close at hand.

Down in my lab something clattered to the floor from one of the shelves or tables. I heard Mister’s paws scampering over the metal surface of the center table.

"What are you grinning at?" my brother asked.

"Mister," I said.

"He’s been knocking around down there all morning," Thomas said. "I was going to go round him up before he broke something, but the skull told me to leave him alone."

"Yeah," I said. I creaked to my feet and shuffled to my little alcove with delusions of kitchenhood. I got out the bottle of aspirin and downed them with a glass of water. "For your own safety. Mister gets upset when someone gets between him and his packet of catnip."

I shuffled over to the lab and peered down. Sure enough, the little cloth bag containing catnip and the silver oak leaf pin still hung from the extra-large rubber band I’d snipped and fixed to the ceiling directly over Little Chicago. As I watched, Mister hopped up onto a worktable, then bounded into the air to bat at the cloth bag. He dragged it down to the table with him, claws hooked in the fabric, and landed on the model of Lincoln Park. My cat rubbed his face ecstatically against the bag for a moment, then released it and batted playfully at it as the rubber band sent it rebounding back and forth near him.