“How do you do that?” She looked disturbed.
I extended my arms, laced my fingers together, and cracked my knuckles. “Like that.”
“S
top it!”
I laughed, and contemplated chasing her around the room, cracking things at her. But that might impact the chance of breakfast, and I was out of sandwiches. “Food?” I asked hopefully.
“Get a shower. I’ll have something for you by the time you’re done.”
That, I decided, was a plan.
Twenty minutes later, I was clean, moisturized, and dressed. But not downstairs, because Claire had a tray waiting for me when I emerged from the bathroom. She’d also brought a chair for herself.
Uh-oh.
Not that I wasn’t happy to have company, but Claire wasn’t a big fan of bedroom eating. If this was a normal conversation, we’d be having it at the kitchen table. So it wasn’t going to be normal, and judging by the closed door, she didn’t want it overheard.
Well, crap.
“Relax,” she told me. “I just want to fill you in.”
“You want to fill me in?” I ambled over to the spread on the spread. “I thought that was my job.”
“Louis-Cesare brought you home. He told me what—” A phone rang. She sighed, pulled it out of a pocket, rolled her eyes, and put it back.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Sit down and have breakfast. Or lunch, I suppose.”
“Lunch? Shouldn’t it be dinner?”
Which is how I found out that I’d slept the clock around.
“Shit!” I was halfway to my feet, when Claire pulled me back down. “Sit. Eat. Listen.”
Which is how I also found out some other things.
“So that’s why we’re talking behind closed doors,” I said.
I was looking at a newspaper pic of Blue’s latest activities. It showed an illegal market in some abandoned subway station. It didn’t specialize in the fey per se, but in forbidden ingredients, the kind of stuff you couldn’t walk into a normal potion shop and buy. But some of those did originate in Faerie.
Need a basilisk’s egg for an unbreakable ward? Got you, fam. Want kelpie blood for detection-proof glamouries? Step right up. How about naga venom, for a poison no antidote can treat? Sure, for a price.
It was exactly the sort of place where you’d expect to find fey bones and the fey supplying them. Because butchering a bunch of helpless slaves is safer than constantly going into Faerie, isn’t it? Or it was.
Until things suddenly got a lot Bluer.
All that was left now were broken cages and blood. Enough of the latter that I was assuming slavers number four and five had just bitten the dust. Along with probably a bunch of their crew.
What a pity.
Claire nodded. “If all this gets out—when it gets out—nobody knows what will happen. But that”—she fluttered a hand at the paper—“will probably get a lot more common!”
“I understand why Olga felt she had to tell the Elders,” I said. “This affects the whole Dark Fey community. I just wish she could have held off for a few days, until we know a little more. We don’t need riots—”
“Oh, there will be riots. You can count on it!”