Copper Girl (8 page)

My voice having fled, I merely stared at him. Before he noticed—or at least, before he mentioned—my newly mute state, one of the silverkin appeared beside us. While I fastened my blouse, Micah and the tiny silver creature communicated in their own language. By the time they were through, I was properly covered and winding my hair into a ponytail.

“If I don’t show up soon, I’ll get fired,” I let out in a rush, before his eyes or lips could influence me.

“They will burn you?” he demanded, aghast.

“No, I’ll lose my job, which would be bad.” I took his hand and tried to impress upon him my need to spend time in a dingy office with overzealous air conditioning and no natural light. “And, if I’m fired, there will be an official report that will follow me for the rest of my life. It will hurt my chances of ever getting a job again. And,” I said over his `I’ll care for you’ spiel, “it will adversely affect my mother and sister, too.”

“Your family is welcome in my home,” he said, but his soft eyes betrayed that I’d already won.

“Didn’t you say that you’d petition the Iron Queen for me?”

“Very well,” he conceded. “Will you be waiting for me tonight?”

“I will,” I promised. There was no place I’d rather be than with Micah tonight.

Micah led me back through the trees to where the veil between my world and his was thin. After a goodbye kiss that left me feeling that this consort situation was workable, except for the whole heir aspect, I stumbled out of the Otherworld. And into my car.
Just call me Grace
.

Apparently, that brandy Micah had given me was lingering in my system, since I thought it was a great idea to head directly from the Otherworld into the office. Luckily, I hadn’t lost as much time as I’d feared while napping my morning away in Micah’s silver castle, and it was long before lunch, and firing, time.

“I had car trouble,” I explained to my boss, hoping he’d buy my admittedly lame excuse. I was still wearing the clothes I’d slept in, twice now, which bore evidence of my walk through the woods. Between my rumpled blouse and the pine needles sticking out from the cuffs of my jeans, I certainly looked like I’d been struggling with something all morning. I smiled brightly, and hoped my heretofore-spotless attendance record counted for something.

Luckily, my boss was the owner of a cantankerous old jalopy, and he sympathized. “Make it up by the end of the week,” he grumbled. I nodded and left his office quickly, before I could say anything (else) foolish.

No sooner was I at my desk than my coworkers arrived in droves, wanting to know what had happened, and, more importantly, what had
really
happened. In a culture where everyone scrimped and saved merely to eat every day, no one came to work late for any reason short of death. What’s more, the fact that I’d had car trouble and been able to get it fixed without having to wait for a paycheck or two was unheard of. Since the wars ended, jobs were still scarce, and money scarcer, unless you worked for the government and, let’s face it, your average desk jockey isn’t exactly Peacekeeper material. Over the past few months of my employment at REES, I’d gotten pretty good at pretending to be poor.

You see, when the government had dissolved Mom and Dad’s marriage, they’d also made her the sole beneficiary of the Raven clan’s vast fortune. That, coupled with the government stipend that was wired directly into our bank accounts every Friday, meant that the remaining Corbeaus wanted for nothing. Hush money, she called it, but they claimed they were only doing right by her. As far as anyone knew, Dad had married a Mundane woman with no magical abilities to speak of, and his children were too young to be trained. So, as a show of good faith, they’d given her the means to live her life in the fashion she and her children had become accustomed to.

Yeah. Hush money.

So, I lived in a tiny apartment, worked at a low-paying office job, and had a closet filled with thrift store finds. I’d explained away my new car by inventing an uncle who worked at an auction house and detailing the many tricks he’d used to make an old heap look new and shiny. My coworkers had grumbled in solidarity, each recalling a car they’d gotten taken on in the past. When I told the horde of gossipmongers crowded around my desk that a mechanic near my apartment owed me, so he’d gotten the work done fast and cheap, the lies just rolled off my tongue. Well, with everyone except Juliana, who lingered long after the rest had wandered away.

“Your car broke down?” she repeated with a raised brow. She was one of the few who knew how I babied it. We’d never missed regular maintenance, my car and I; I hardly ever let the wiper fluid get low.

I tried to play it cool. “Turned out to be a loose wire,” I replied. “I guess it wasn’t hooked up properly during the last tune-up.”

“Mmm.” She let that one go, but only to start a new line of inquiry.

“I tried to call you this morning,” she said. “About five times.”

My hands flew to my pockets, only to come up empty. I’d been in such a panic this morning I’d only grabbed my keys, leaving behind my phone, my purse, and all my other daily necessities. I didn’t even have money for lunch.

And…I’d left the watch that held my tracking device in my car. Crap.

“I was in a hurry, and I forgot it,” I mumbled. Distracted as I searched my desk for food, I stood and rummaged in my file cabinet. As I did, Juliana’s eyes fixated on my neck.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked, eyeing the silver chain.

“From a boy,” I replied, fluttering my eyes. I pulled it out of my shirt to show her the oak leaf and acorn. “Isn’t it nice?” Juliana leaned forward to get a better view, and caught a whiff of my breath.

“Have you been drinking?” she accused.

No point in adding to the lies. “Keep it down,” I hissed. “I had a late night.”

“You were out all night with this mysterious man, you show up late for work smelling like a brewery, and now you’ve got a fortune in silver hanging around your neck.” She lowered her voice and asked, “Is he a pimp?”

“What? No!” Her accusation wasn’t completely out of the blue; lots of girls we knew turned to streetwalking in order to make ends meet. I, however, would never, ever be one of them, even if that Raven-funded bank account dried up this instant. “He’s just well-off. I think his family has money.”

Juliana straightened up, still giving me that appraising eye. “You didn’t have any car trouble, did you?”

“No,” I replied sheepishly. “It was the first excuse I could think of.”

“Well, tonight, at The Room, you can tell me all about your man.”

“I can’t go tonight. I’m meeting up with him.”

“Bring him.”

Oh, that would just be awesome. Hey, Juliana, meet my elfin consort. He lives in a silver palace, you know, with gem-encrusted hallways and tiny silver servants
. “Maybe after a few more dates,” I replied. “Why bother introducing him if he won’t be sticking around?”

Juliana nodded, then rolled a chair over and made herself at home in my cubicle. “So, tell me about him now.”

“Well,” I began, playing coy while my brain desperately tried to filter out inappropriate content. “What would you like to know?”

“A name, for starters.”

“Mi- Mike,” I said. “His name is Mike Silver.”

“And he gives silver jewelry.” Juliana rolled her eyes, but I didn’t mind. Although, if Micah really had been a human, a name like Mike Silver would have been pretty lame.

“And he’s tall, and super sweet, and—”

“And do you have that same dumb grin on your face when you talk to him?”

My hands flew to my face; yep, I was grinning like a fool. “I can’t help it. I really like him.”

“All the more reason you should bring him tonight,” Juliana said. “We need to properly evaluate him, to know if he’s a keeper.”

“Oh, he’s a keeper,” I said, “but we have plans.”

Juliana cajoled for a bit longer, but I was adamant in my refusals. It was easy, since showing up with an elf would be an automatic death sentence for Micah, and me, and possibly everyone else at The Room. After Juliana extracted a promise from me to tell her everything over breakfast the next morning, she finally returned to her desk. I turned to my own heap of work, but I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t even see the reports in front of me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Micah’s silver eyes.

I struggled through the rest of the day, though I only managed to accomplish an embarrassingly small amount of work. A few times, I considered shoving those reports into the shredder and pretending that I’d never seen them. Stupid, pointless wastes of paper, that’s all they really were. As soon as I organized and logged one folder’s worth, Floyd dropped off a new stack, along with a few comments about how I’d paid for the work on my car. I seriously considered stapling his mouth shut.

What was worse than both the endless mound of paper and Floyd’s continued existence was avoiding Juliana. I didn’t like lying to my best friend, but I really didn’t have a choice in the matter. I couldn’t exactly tell her that I’d spent the morning with an elf and had asked him to petition a magical queen for help in finding my missing brother and father—
you know, that missing dad I told you about, the patriarch of the Raven clan? Yep, those Ravens, the ones we read about in the history books, who made a final, fruitless stand against the government
.

I spent the afternoon walking reports here and there across the office, repeatedly declining Juliana’s invitations to head over to The Room. Finally, I insisted that I would be staying late to make up the hours I’d missed that morning; she didn’t like that excuse, but it was one she couldn’t argue with.

Before I knew it, the clock struck five, and all my dedicated coworkers made a beeline toward the door. From my vantage point by the file cabinets, I watched as they practically ran toward the parking lot, pairing up in twos and threes as they piled into cars and departed. As soon as the lot was empty, I abandoned my pointless paperwork and drove home.

I burst through my apartment door, relieved that I’d remembered to lock it, doubly relieved to find my purse in its usual spot on the side table. I plunked the watch/illegally-removed tracker on the table, and I wondered if—no, make that
when
—I’d be questioned about today. Since I had been at REES, the government had known exactly where I had been all day, my presence having been verified by several drones and our ancient, cranky time clock, not to mention extra-thorough Peacekeeper Jerome. I still needed to wash those handprints off my car.

I sighed and shoved the watch into the depths of my purse. Would they ever really know where I had been that morning? Did they bother to check time clock reports against tracker coordinates? I couldn’t imagine why they would bother, unless Mom was right and we really were always being watched. Gods. Please, don’t let Mom’s paranoias come true.

If the Peacekeepers did choose to question me as to my whereabouts, I’d have the not so small problem of my tracker being outside my body. And, no, there was no suitable explanation for this; they’d even started leaving trackers in corpses, since a group of mages had faked their own deaths a few years ago. I didn’t want to re-implant the tracker in my shoulder, but what else could I do? If Peacekeepers chose to examine me and it wasn’t there, I’d probably be locked up. The only excuse I could think of was a malfunction of my powers; no, that definitely wouldn’t work, since I was not supposed to be able to use them. Not to mention that a fresh wound on my shoulder would be a dead giveaway.

Great. Looked like I’d finally find Max, after all
.

Since there was nothing I could do about the tracker, I left it and grabbed my phone. As I unwound the charging cable, I checked the call log. Yep, Juliana had called me five times before lunch, and twice since she’d left work. I appreciated her concern, but really, if she didn’t start paying less attention to me, and more to her own life, I wouldn’t be the only terminally single girl.

Phone comfortably charging, I headed toward the bathroom. As I stood in the shower, letting the steaming water soothe my aching muscles and rinse away the lingering scents of pine and alcohol and toner cartridges, evidence of both my morning in the Otherworld and my afternoon in the office, I couldn’t help thinking about Micah. ‘Consort.’ He’d called me his consort and seemed to have no problem becoming instantly serious with a woman he hardly knew. It hadn’t even been a week since he’d showed up in my dream (or rather, since I’d pulled him into it), and he was already discussing heirs. Which was a fancy word for children! Sometimes, I didn’t feel like much more than a child myself.