Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,63
between the rear end of two neighboring shops. The paint on its clapboard front and slanted roof had dulled and faded, but I could tell it’d once been a vibrant pink and blue. That looked like a fae’s design sense, all right.
“Is she around?” I asked without thinking the question through.
“I can pop in and check!” the imp offered, and sprang toward the closed door.
“Hold on!” I said quickly. I should have remembered she didn’t have much sense of boundaries. “I’d imagine it’ll give a better impression if we’re polite enough to knock rather than barging right in.”
Antic shrugged as if it was all the same to her and rapped her small fist against the door. “Daisy?”
Omen stepped closer. No visible hint of his shadowkind form showed, but his aura of power intensified enough that the energy tickled over my skin. “We know you’re here, and you know we’re shadowkind,” he said to the patches of darkness around the house. “We only want to ask a few questions. I’d rather not have to get more insistent about that.”
I smacked his arm. “What did I just say about politeness?”
He gave me a baleful look. “I phrased that threat very politely.” He turned his gaze back to the house. “To be clear, I’d much rather keep things peaceful.”
What was he going to do if the fae woman didn’t emerge—dive into the shadows and wrench her out by force? She’d be just overjoyed to answer our questions then.
I made a face at him and attempted my own plea. “We wouldn’t be asking—or being assholes about it, in the case of someone I won’t name—if it wasn’t important. It’s about a fae named Luna who used to live in Austin a long time back. A gnome suggested you might have known her.”
For a moment, nothing happened. Then a form shimmered into being in front of us.
The fae woman wasn’t Luna’s twin or anything, but she had enough of the same fae features that I could have believed they were cousins. Her pale hair sparkled in the pigtails she’d wrapped with shiny pink ribbons; actual glitter gleamed all over her frilly dress. She’d draped several strands of crystalline glass that looked as though she might have stolen them from the store’s chandeliers over her shoulders as an opulent sort-of necklace. Her features were delicate except for her eyes, which were just a little too large to look comfortably human. Those eyes fixed on me.
“You know Luna?” she said in a tinkling voice that reminded me of my guardian too, so much that my lungs constricted. “It’s been so long—I kept hoping she might come back.”
The constricting sensation deepened. She didn’t know that Luna couldn’t ever come back. “Luna… looked after me when I was a kid. But she was taken down by hunters several years ago. I’m sorry. Were you close when we lived here?”
“Oh, no. She’s gone?” The woman’s face fell for a moment before she seemed to recover. Her makeshift finery tinkled as she shifted on her feet. “I couldn’t say we were really close, but, you know…”
She tipped her head to the side and gave me a dreamy smile that sent another wave of recognition through me. I hadn’t really talked to any fae women other than Luna—I hadn’t realized how much she simply represented her kind rather than her own unique approach to life. Apparently coyness was another common trait.
“I always wished we could be better friends,” the fae went on. “She had so much energy; it was lovely to be around her. But she was so busy too…”
I fought past the eerie resemblance to focus on my search for answers. “Do you know who else she spent time with? Was there anyone in particular?”
“Let me see, let me see… It was so long ago!” She tapped her lips with another cutesy tip of her head to send her pigtails bobbing. “She mostly stuck to the downtown area. I can’t think of anyone still around who’d—oh. There was the elf. I always wondered why she bothered with him. But I saw them together a bunch of times.”
I’d take whatever leads I could get. “And this elf is still in the city? Where we could find him?”
“Oh, he came from the worst place. I don’t go out that way anymore, but he never moved that I knew of. He might still be there.”
“Where?” Omen demanded, the threatening edge coming back into his voice.