in nothing except the tension in Charles’s arm as they walked through the safety zone of the sidewalk.
“Even if they were to choose to attack,” she murmured to him, “they are safely caged behind that vinyl chain-link fence. I think you can relax.”
“Vinyl doesn’t do anything to stop magic,” Charles murmured back. “The steel wire beneath might have some effect, but it is best to be prepared.”
Under the circumstances it was difficult for her to tell whether he was being funny or serious. Neither of them was under the illusion it was the threat from the fae that was causing his tension.
Still, he had a point about being prepared to face a hostile threat from the fae here. It was time she turn her attention away from having her own children and start trying to discover who had sent Chelsea off to murder hers.
The kids took no notice of a pair of uninteresting adults wandering up to the main doors. Surely if a fae were among them, he or she would notice that Anna and Charles were a little different from most people, but maybe not.
When Charles drew a deep breath of air through his nose, Anna followed suit. She didn’t smell any fae—though her experience with fae was fairly limited. She wasn’t sure she would detect one right under her nose. Charles didn’t say anything, so she assumed that he didn’t scent anything, either.
Hosteen had rendered his power to be of assistance moot by his absence. Charles had turned down Kage flatly—one human was as easily bespelled as another. Probably more easily, since Kage was not witchborn like his wife. Wade had been easier because Hosteen’s orders were that he was to help with Chelsea, so leaving him home hadn’t incited rebellion.
That left Anna and Charles to go check it out. Anna was pretty sure that being a werewolf wasn’t an automatic defense, either, but Charles wasn’t worried about confronting a fae. She put her trust in him.
Anna winced as someone blew a shrill whistle on the playground. Charles didn’t even twitch as he held the door open for her. She wondered how he managed it.
There was a big sign on the door immediately to their right as soon as they entered the building. It said PRINCIPAL EDISON—ALL VISITORS PLEASE CHECK IN. It amused Charles. A day care was really just an efficient way to provide babysitting and not actually a school.
Anna knocked on the closed door and Charles stepped back to let his wife interface with the public. People liked her, and, as a bonus, she didn’t scare them. People talked to him because they were intimidated. Anna could usually get more and better information from people because they honestly wanted to make her happy.
The woman who opened the door of the principal’s office looked tired and a little startled to see them, though she tried to cover it over with a big, and mostly sincere, smile.
“Hello,” she said, recovering. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I’m Farrah Edison. Welcome to Sunshine Fun. You said you have a four-year-old and a five-year-old, right?”
“We’d like to talk to the teachers of the four-year-old and the five-year-old classes,” Anna said.
Charles took the opportunity to sample the air in the principal’s office. He didn’t notice that it smelled particularly of fae-anything. But he wouldn’t, because the principal wore Opium, one of the perfumes that tended to kill his ability to scent things.
Anna looked at a ragged piece of paper she carried. “We’d like to see Miss Baird and Ms. Newman. You told us this would be a good time to speak with them both.”
Anna’s voice rose at the end, as if she weren’t sure they were here at the right time, seeming to allow Ms. Edison a graceful way to reschedule things if she needed to. It was a tactful response to the surprise Ms. Edison had displayed; she’d obviously forgotten they were coming.
“Yes. You can talk to Ms. Newman first. Her children are in music for another fifteen minutes. When they get back, Miss Baird’s students will go and you can sneak over to her room.”
Students and teachers at a day care? Charles weighed the vocabulary. He supposed children were learning a lot between the ages of two and five. He pursed his lips and regarded the sign again. Maybe this was a school.
As they followed the principal down the hallway, she told them about how they planned the meals they served, their hours, and their rates, which were