Faerie Magic Read Free Page B

life.
    Vance picked up one of the cookies and bit into it. I turned my glare onto him.
    “Did you just invite yourself into my house?”
    “Technically, your friend invited me in.”
    “Then I’m uninviting you.”
    He put on a mock-wounded expression. “Such a cutting tongue. Isabel, can you give me the recipe for these?”
    “I—yeah. Sure.” Her face flushed like a traffic light.
    Great. Not only had he invited himself into my flat, he’d charmed the wits out of my best friend.
    “Vance,” I said warningly. “Tell me why you’re here or I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
    “Really.”
    I glared at him. “No bullshit. What do you want?”
    “Wouldn’t you believe I wanted to make a friendly social call?”
    Isabel wisely ducked out of sight. I heard her bedroom door close and sighed inwardly. Great. Exactly what I least needed.
    “What the actual hell, Vance,” I hissed. “It’s common courtesy to let people know you’re planning to vanish off the face of the earth. Especially when you’ve just offered them a job.”
    His smile vanished. “I apologise. I was called to an urgent meeting and forbidden to take my phone with me.”
    Oh. “Right. Any reason you didn’t text me when you came back? Or talked to me yesterday when you weren’t pulling your creepy super-powered Mage Lord trick on the half-faeries?”
    “I rather think it’d have spoilt the impression.”
    I crossed my arms. “You think I’d have wrecked your street cred? That’s beside the point. You disappeared. Right after we—” Nearly died. As he knew well, the dickhead. He’d also kissed me. Several times. No, I wasn’t keeping a tally.
    “You’re suggesting I ought to have told the entire town the council of mages were gone?”
    “You have my number,” I said. “And I had the impression you—” What? Liked me? Wanted me?
    One eyebrow rose. “Yes?”
    “Intended to finish our conversation,” I said, already regretting speaking. “Never mind. I should have figured you’d disappear as soon as you had reason to.” He was the Mage Lord. He probably had hordes of swooning fangirls hanging around his manor. Sure, I’d never seen any, but we’d only known one another a couple of weeks.
    “The leader of the East Midlands mages was murdered,” said Vance, stunning me into silence.
    “What?”
    “Murdered,” he repeated, with a flash of anger in his eyes. “By a half-faerie.”
    I gaped at him, unable to hide my shock. Half-faeries might be anti-human and pretty much anti-supernatural, too, but even they showed basic respect to the mages. The Mage Lords, most of all.
    “Who?”
    “That’s what we’re trying to determine,” he said. “It appears to be an isolated act of a madman, but our supernatural alliances are fragile, and this might mean dividing further.”
    “The half-faeries live behind an impenetrable hedge,” I said. “Pretty sure that’s as divided as you can get. And one of them was murdered yesterday, actually. By another half-blood.”
    He raised an eyebrow again. “Really.”
    “Yes.” I didn’t say Larsen had told me. Like absolute hell would I admit to the Mage Lord that I’d nearly taken work from Larsen. Even if he’d driven me to it. “Obviously, I haven’t been able to poke around, because when we got there, the whole place was about to go up in flames.”
    “Why were you near half-blood district in the first place?”
    I scowled. He always managed to ask the questions I least wanted to hear. “On a job. Might have escaped your attention I’m short on cash.”
    He frowned. “You just got paid for our work bringing those children back from Faerie.”
    He doesn’t know? “The necromancers took it.” My hands curled into fists. The bastards. Sure, I’d killed one of them, but he’d been possessed by a half-faerie ghost and trying to kill me at the time. The necromancers didn’t see it that way.
    Vance’s icy cold expression could have frozen embers. “I