to pull a lock of my hair through his fingers and smiled. “Don’t say…”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“What were you going to say?”
“Too bad.” I liked him more every minute. “Job is yours now. You’re the guardrails for a race that can be, shall we say, morally ambiguous.” He looked at my preliminary piles. “What else?”
“So, you’re the Enforcer and the Advisor?”
He laughed and shook his head slightly. “Lochlan’s the advisor. I’m just the bloke who’s sleeping with the judge.” I raised an eyebrow. “And, yes, it’s new. I’ve never had a physical relationship with a magistrate.”
I cocked my head and assessed him thoughtfully. “Can I trust you, Keir? Really trust you?”
The look on his face resembled shock and his response was barely above a whisper.
“Yes,” was all he said. “Your well-being comes first with me. It always will.”
We talked about a few other cases.
“Lochlan will go over this, but the first day is usually reserved for evidentiarily-minor cases that won’t require a lot of presentation.”
“Open and shut.” I summed it up. He nodded. I looked at my pile system. “So I need to organize my piles according to importance and order.”
“If you want to get a jump on it. Up to you.”
The leprechaun whose pot of gold was stolen as a prank, but the loss, though temporary, had caused him such distress that he cursed the adolescent pranksters with a magical form of leprosy. Despite pleas from the parents and offers of more pots of gold, the little hothead refused to withdraw the affliction. Pile number one. First day.
The phoenix who’d been captured and kept for the entertainment of a fae princess who liked to set the bird on fire and watch it struggle back to life from ashes. Pile number one. First day.
One of the fae queens was jilted by a lover a few thousand years ago. He’d forgotten all about it when he requested an upgrade to his palatial residence, but she hadn’t. She cheerfully accepted the commission and just as cheerfully acted out her woman-scorned feelings by trapping him in a “Groundhog Day” scenario. For a century, he relived the same day without being able to leave his house until relatives realized there was a problem. He wants restitution. Pile number one. First day.
A young gargoyle had been taken along on a shopping spree to Paris by a fae noblewoman. She told him to wait at Notre Dame where he’d likely go unnoticed. Unfortunately, she forgot about her pet and left him there, stranded in the human world. The gargoyle chieftain, who is the kid’s great-uncle, wants the noblewoman stranded in Paris for seventy-six years, the exact time the kid lived in fear of discovery.
At that I threw the file down. “You got a lot of irredeemable personalities in the fae world,” I said in disgust.
Keir had been sitting with his arms crossed over his anatomically implausible abs. In response to my outburst, he reached up to rub his bottom lip with his thumb. After evaluating my statement, he said, “In your life as a human, how much time did you spend as an observer in the courts?”
“None.” He waited. “Okay. I see where you’re going with this. You’re saying there are plenty of unsavory characters in the human world as well, but out of sight, out of mind.”
“Well put.” He smiled. “Let’s go to bed. You’re tired and filled with righteous indignation. I can take the edge off that.”
I harrumphed. “Sure. Maybe now. But not in the middle of Court Week when I want to personally strangle people or hang them by their thumbs.”
He barked out a laugh. “Hanging by thumbs. I haven’t heard that one for a very long time. You should keep it in your tool kit.”
“Why? It seems like every case is resolved with some kind of fine.”
After a small grunt, Keir said, “That may be partly tradition and partly laziness. This job is yours to make of it what you will. You’ll bring your own personality and creativity and… Well.”
“You were going to say it.”
He laughed. “Guilty.”
The next morning there was a timid knock at the door at eight thirty.
Keir had already gone. Apparently.
I dragged myself to the door and peeped through the thoughtfully-provided hole, before opening it.
“Olivia. What…?”
“I need to tidy up, Mistress.” Mistress? “You might be having company.” She looked over her shoulder.
“What kind of company?”
“I was told it’s a human tradition. Housewarming?”
I looked down at my rumpled nightclothes and opened the door wider. “I’m getting in the