Faerie Magic Read Free Page A

with shifter blood I’d met who’d demonstrated any kind of restraint. Sometimes, anyway.
    Okay, so he’d skewered people with invisible swords and came close to accidentally killing me twice. Maybe it was for the best we’d never got a date.
    “Come on,” said Isabel. “Let’s go and fetch those piskies.”
    “I’d rather walk in there.” I jerked my thumb at the gate. “Wonder who died?”
    “Probably more than one of them by now, the way they were fighting.” Isabel grimaced. “What kind of magic did he use?”
    She didn’t need to say his name. I turned my back on the half-faeries’ place and reluctantly led the way to the house where we’d left those piskies.
    “Mage Lord mojo. No clue. He’s a displacer, so I suppose he shifted all the air around us to make a dramatic breeze.”
    “And vanished into thin air,” added Isabel. “Is he a stage magician in his spare time?”
    I snorted. “He defines ‘over-dramatic’, but no. As for where he’s been the last week, no clue.”
    “Might have stuck around to help us with this.” She indicated the garden up ahead, and the ruins of the shed. How were we meant to explain to the people who’d hired us that the piskies had blown up half their garden? We’d probably get charged for damages on top of not being paid.
    I groaned. Time to explain the rules of magic to sceptical humans, again. I doubted Vance would consider the trouble the fight would draw from the other faeries living in this realm. No, some poor freelancer would have to deal with the mess.
    Unfortunately, only one person in town specialised in dealing with faerie cases. Yay me.
    ***
    “Paperwork,” said Isabel in a singsong voice, depositing a stack inside my bedroom door. I rubbed my eyes and groaned. Unlike me, Isabel was wide awake for someone who frequently pulled all-nighters, dressed in an outfit entirely too bright a shade of green for this hour in the morning.
    “Thought you’d let me sleep in,” I mumbled, hiding my head under the pillow.
    “You need to hand these into clean-up by ten. I would, but I have to be with the coven in an hour.”
    I groaned again and rolled out of bed. We’d stayed up half the night filling out paperwork to prove the piskies were responsible for the damage to the garden so we’d actually get paid. No money had materialised yet. I didn’t blame the garden’s owners for being pissed, but it eluded me how a bunch of hyped-up piskies could possibly have blown up a shed.
    I wasn’t mentally present at all. Bite marks covered my hands and arms because I’d forgotten to use a healing spell after all the excitement. Worse, us coming back smelling of piskie had sent our own resident piskie, Erwin, into a frenzy. He’d zoomed around breaking things until we’d been forced to trap him in a spell circle.
    I shoved on my second-least tattered pair of jeans and a T-shirt that used to be black before the colour washed out, and walked barefoot into the kitchen to scrounge some food. The smell of Isabel’s baking cookies somewhat restored my mood. She’d left a tray out on the side, luckily away from the chalk circles covering every other work surface in the flat.
    The doorbell rang.
    “Oh, for god’s sake.” I turned heel and went to answer it. Please not Larsen. Please not Vance. For once, I wouldn’t have minded it being a freaking door to door salesman, if just to avoid being dragged into any more crap.
    Like I’d be that lucky. The Mage Lord stood on the doorstep, coat sweeping around him—more due to the autumn wind than his mage special effects.
    “Oh,” I said. “It’s you.”
    “Don’t look so happy to see me,” said Vance Colton. “Are you baking?” He walked right past me, and before I could gather my wits, walked over to Isabel. “Those look nice.”
    “Oh, take one,” she said, with a cheery smile. I shot her a glare, which she ignored. Dammit. Compliment Isabel’s cooking and you’d pretty much got an open invite for