IT TOOK NEARLY four hours to finish signing the papers. By that point, writing “Marissa Locks” felt like writing the entirety of a Chinese phone book. I called to arrange backup for Shigeru, selecting an acidic moat monster who could dissolve anything that set foot in the room. How exactly our contractors intended to get it into the hospital was not my problem. Keeping Ari alive was.
Long after Rosa locked the front door, I wandered the halls of the Agency, poking into offices, checking out storage rooms. It wasn’t as if I was spying. According to what I’d signed, the lease, the accounts, everything belonged to me. I checked the office fridge for food, and found only the wheel of cheese that’d been there since my first anniversary with the Agency. No one in their right mind touched the thing. Every person who so much as laid a finger on it died bloody deaths within hours.
Then I went into Grimm’s office, sat down at his desk, and began to sift through papers. Grimm was never physically at his desk. In fact, we had a scanner that did nothing but slide papers past his mirror. There were the usual receipts. More than a few letters from lawyers threatening to sue, and quite a few thank-you notes. I’m assuming they were thank-you notes, as the writing looked bubbly, and happy, even though I couldn’t read the language.
I wanted more than anything to talk to Liam, but Liam was hiding in a castle, hopefully at the end of a long line of traps. Odds were, Grimm’s defenses were good. Odds were, the vampire’s assassins would kill anyone who survived traveling through the dungeon. But odds were also good Queen Mihail did her homework. That she’d sent a team wearing asbestos underwear. That the man I loved more than anyone else in this world was in serious danger and might die before he could offer me a ring I already wore.
I wouldn’t have worried, normally. I could handle anything, with Grimm’s knowledge and a little bit of magical assistance. But Grimm was frozen, and the only thing left was an Echo. And right then I began to wonder. I left his office and went back to my own, where I found the briefcase. When I clicked it on, Echo’s face appeared.
“Marissa, you have passed the identity test. Thank you for your cooperation, my dear.”
“Echo, how much do you know?”
He frowned at me. “We had this conversation. I am a recording of all of Fairy Godfather’s thoughts during the recording process.”
“Did he think about Ari?” I tapped the pen on my desk nervously, wondering if my idea would work.
Echo nodded. “The sheer number of things he considered during the two point eight milliseconds where I was captured would astound you. He most certainly considered Princess Arianna.”
“So if Ari were in a coma, and I needed to keep her safe, how would Grimm do it?” I didn’t know how far Echo’s limits went, but it couldn’t hurt to find out.
“I do not possess his array of knowledge, Marissa. Only a recording of what he thought about during a remarkably brief time. However, I believe we reason along identical lines. This can hardly be the first time a princess has found herself incapacitated. How were they kept safe before?”
“Is the gateway to Grimm’s library open?” Grimm had a better selection than the branch library, so long as you didn’t want to read romance and you liked memoirs of people dead for five centuries.
Echo stared at me, his eyebrows raised, his lips drawn tight. “The secondary closet across from the teleconference room is the current portal. I realize this is beyond my purpose, but I believe Fairy Godfather would advise you to go home and get some sleep. If Princess Arianna is protected for the moment, then judging from my assessment of your condition, you will deal better with this problem once you have rested. Now kindly turn me off and go home.”
* * *
AT HOME, I couldn’t sleep. It was the knowledge that Liam was in danger. It was the fear of what might happen to Ari. That Grimm might be truly gone. If he were, it was only a matter of time before another Fairy came looking to move in and set up shop. It was unlikely they’d tolerate competition.
I stayed up far into the morning reading about princesses, and their total and complete inability to get hurt like a normal person. Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, that Anesthesia chick in Russia. The clock said I only had a couple hours until my alarm went off when I finally figured I’d put enough of the pieces together. I blinked, and the alarm blared. Not time for work. Time to head into Kingdom for my doctor’s appointment.
If—no,
when
—I figured out a way out of this revenge mess, I planned on having a lot of makeup sex and not giving birth to a cursed child. I made it into Kingdom before the doctor’s office even opened, and when the elf at the front desk opened for registrations, I marched up and signed my name.
She read it over, wrinkled her nose, and then read it again. “You’ll have to come back when you have an appointment.”
“I have one. Made by the Fairy Godfather, a couple of days ago.” Grimm never slept, never forgot, and never forgave.
The elf sniffed again, wiggling her ears in distress. “I don’t have any record of that, Ms. Locks. If you’d like, I can put you on the normal list. We can see you next November.” I swore my way out of the office and off to work. When, not if, I managed to get Grimm restored, he was going to answer to me.
Without an appointment to keep, I made it into work early. Of course, no matter how early I got there, Rosa beat me through the door. I once asked Grimm if Rosa might have actually been some sort of appliance that came with the building. At the front door of the office I nodded to her.
She completely ignored me.
“Morning, Rosa.”
She looked over the counter at me like she’d discovered that someone left a bean casserole in the lobby over the weekend. So much for getting more respect. I’d barely made coffee and settled down for the morning paper when the shouting started.
I ignored it.
There was no reason to go running off just because people were upset with each other. In fact, I preferred not to intervene until blood transfusions became necessary. The shouting rose to shrieking, then screaming, then chanting. Screaming, fighting, no problem. When people started casting spells in my lobby, I took issue with it.
I took the paper and my coffee, and went to find out what Rosa wasn’t handling. In the lobby stood two people dressed in long robes. Echo said I’d have hired help with the spells, and these looked to be my enchanters. Then I got a better look at them. Those weren’t long robes. They were bathrobes. I swore under my breath. Why couldn’t Grimm hire real spell slingers?
“Can I help you?” I set down the coffee and rolled up the paper. I’d dealt with enchanters before, and it was like training a puppy.
The woman nodded. She was older, probably nearing fifty, and wore glasses so scratched they were milky white. Her long white hair had pinecones and bits of garbage in it. “We’re here to fulfill contract 27-Alpha-323.”
I looked at the man standing behind her. He looked curiously familiar, and smelled like a garbage truck and a wine bar combined. “You the enchanters Fairy Godfather hired?”
He kept his eyes on the floor and mumbled something indistinct.
I looked back at the woman.
“Not exactly. We’re here to fulfill their contract. See, Grabnar the Great is in jail, and Elinda got bitten by an asp at the post office.”
I made a mental note to take a closer look at Grimm’s contract to figure out where he’d allowed substitutions. I had an Agency to run, no spell powers of my own, and a couple of enchanters who looked like they’d fallen off the wagon, then been strapped to the wagon wheel and run over repeatedly. “All right. Let me show you to the temp worker’s offices.”
I waved them on after me.
“Don’t you want to know our names?” asked the woman.
“Not really.” I treated my temp workers like I treated my potted plants. Until they’d survived several weeks at the Agency, they didn’t get names or love. When we got to the temp offices, I put them to work. “We’ve had four outbreaks of poodles in the last month. That’s way too many for this time of year. So put your wands together, draw a few pentagrams, and pull an answer out of your hat for where they’re coming from.”
“We don’t use wands or pentagrams,” said the woman, glaring at me.
“Or hats,” said the man.
I nodded. “I don’t care if you do card tricks. I want to know where the poodles are coming from. Rosa can get you anything you need, as long as you don’t need anything. Call me when you have an answer.” The office buzzer went off, meaning in the time it’d taken me to park a couple of enchanters, someone else arrived.
I ambled back to the lobby and smiled. Beth sat in a lobby chair, clipboard in hand, filling in her daily application. “Morning, Beth.”
She smiled at me, a silver ring flashing in her nose as she did. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be here.”
I shrugged. “Not the first or last time there’ll be a team of assassins dispatched to kill everyone in the office, I expect. It’s like that around here. A lot.”
Beth blew a single note on the kazoo, and the rat in front of her did cartwheels. “I lived in a crack house for a while, so I’m okay with crazy. I can make rats do anything now!”
I snorted. “Rats. Teenagers. You aren’t a real piper until you can control something evil. Something awful.”
Beth caught my tone and locked her eyes on me. She put one hand on her hip and cocked an eyebrow. “Such as?”
I waved her on, and she followed me to our back storage room. Inside, a six-foot kennel shook and rattled like something from Inferno raged inside it.
Beth shivered, then clenched her fists and nodded to me.
With a magician’s flourish, I yanked the blanket off the kennel, revealing the white terror inside. A single white toy poodle, about two feet long at most, with its tail sculpted in a bob cut.
Its beady eyes focused on Beth as it began to wag its tail, yipping happily and prancing.
Beth knelt by the cage. “Hey, little girl. What’s a cute little thing like you doing—”
The poodle rocketed through the air. It slammed into the kennel door, hitting it so hard, the cage lurched forward, smashing Beth in the face.
Beth began cursing like a longshoreman as she rolled onto her knees and stood up. Blood dribbled from her nose, and above her eye she had the makings of a fine bruise. “What the hell is that thing?”
“Poodle.” I checked the kennel door to make sure the welds held.
Beth kicked the cage. “My aunt had a poodle. It didn’t do that. It didn’t look like that.”
“That one hadn’t fed on hellfire and human flesh. Don’t get me wrong, it was still evil, but this, this is a piece of Inferno, come to play games in the city. They get stronger and cuter with every person they kill. So you can lead rats. You can control teenagers. So what? This is what counts.”
Beth reached into a pocket and took out her kazoo. A low, mournful hum came from it as she began to play.
The poodle stood its ground, ears flattened back, teeth bared.
Beth played louder, longer, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with such power it almost compelled me to follow her wherever she would go.
The poodle leaped at the kennel door again, rattling it.
With an exhausted sigh, Beth dropped her kazoo. The brass clinked on the floor as she panted. “I can’t do it. It doesn’t listen.”
“You can. You’ll have to practice. Rats want to eat garbage. Teen boys want to eat and have sex. Poodles have a will of their own, and to be able to run them off into the river, you’ll need to match it.”
I left her with her fuzzy white nemesis.
* * *
WHILE MY TEAM of enchanters worked to figure out where the Poodle leak was, and my new piper worked to control a single weak poodle, I grabbed some lunch. In the kitchen, Mikey sat at the table, his gangly arms propped up as he ate a sandwich of indeterminable origin. He looked like he was about to vomit.
“What’s the matter, Mikey? Did you eat the special at Froni’s this weekend?”
He slumped over, dejected. “Steph didn’t show up for our date. We talked on the phone, I went to meet her at the subway, and she never showed up. I didn’t even get spaghetti.”
Mikey had never eaten at Froni’s, which was the only reason he was upset about not getting to go. The place violated every health ordinance in the city. In fact, I suspected Froni lobbied for new regulations every month so he could break them.
“Sometimes things come up. It’ll get better. I need you to take the night shift tonight to give the moat monster and Shigeru a break. Eat anyone who comes near Ari.”
He pulled out a phone and dialed a number. After a few moments he slammed the phone down. “She’s not answering my calls, and her voice mail is full.”
I remembered being so in love with someone I could hardly breathe. “Is she beautiful?” Given Mikey’s taste in women, it was possible she looked like a yeti. Heck, it was entirely possible she was a yeti, or the bearded lady at the circus. Wolves were known for their taste in sausage, not women. Also, occasionally for making sausage from women.
Mikey punched a few buttons on his phone. “This is her at the fountain in Kingdom.” He handed me the phone.
I looked at her red hair and familiar face, and my stomach turned. “Mikey, what’s Steph’s last name?”
He caught the tone in my voice and looked up, his forehead creased. “Thromson.”
I did my best to keep my voice calm as fear and anger warred for which emotion would be the first to break through. “Mikey, did Steph ask about your day?”
He nodded.
“Did she ask what you did?” My hands tightened around the phone until I was afraid I’d crush it.
“Yeah. She always asked about my day.” Mikey didn’t take his eyes off me.
“Did she ask what you were doing Monday?”
He put his head in his hands. “Yes. She asked—she asked what all of us were doing.”
I had one more question to ask before I’d know if I needed to go get the reaper bullets and kill Mikey. “What’s Ari’s last name?”
He didn’t as much as flinch. “Locks. It says Locks on all of her packages.”
Locks was technically my last name. Ari shared it with me while she lived in my apartment, and since her stepmother disowned her and kicked her out of Kingdom, Ari kept it when she moved out on her own. “Arianna Thromson is her real name, Mikey. You’ve heard Ari talk about her family, right?”