around it, I found Ms. B standing on the edge of the middle shelf, shaking her head as she dug through the spare linens.
“They’re all musty from disuse,” she said, her voice somewhere between disgust and dismay. She snatched a thick comforter, pulling it free and giving it a vigorous shake all in one motion. A prickle of magic filled the air, and I guessed the comforter was now fresh and clean.
I considered repeating some of the points several of the fae had made on why magic and glamour needed to be conserved, but brownies were a tidy and fastidious lot. My musty linen closet not only provided a distraction from the events of the day, but I doubted she would bed down in anything less than brownie-approved clean.
“Do you want my bed?” I asked as she refolded the large comforter with a flick of her wrist, the heavy material defying gravity to arrange itself neatly. “I can head downstairs to the guest room.”
Ms. B gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “Your bed is much too big and open for my liking,” she said, hopping from the shelf with the folded comforter in her arms. She’d added a pillowcase as well, though no pillow, and the two-item stack was taller than she was. That didn’t slow her down. She scurried across the small kitchenette, her green quill-like hair dragging behind her.
She stopped in front of one of the lower cabinets, and it opened on its own. Ms. B carried in her pile of linens, arranging the thick comforter on the bottom of the cabinet like she was creating a den. She didn’t even have to rearrange anything to do it. While I’d left all my kitchen gear in the apartment, I hadn’t actually ever owned much—I was a ramen noodles or nuked hot pocket kind of a chef.
Once the small brownie had arranged the comforter into a cushy nest, she tucked herself in with the pillowcase as a blanket. “Good night,” she said in her gruff voice, and then the cabinet door closed without anyone touching it.
Okay then. A cabinet didn’t look like somewhere I’d want to sleep, but then I wasn’t a two-foot-tall brownie. I splashed some water on my face and made a mental note to buy some essentials. I should have picked some up while I’d been shopping for the FIB agents, but I hadn’t thought about it. Then I slid off my boots, placed my dagger under my pillow, and settled into bed, as I didn’t have anything to change into.
Then I lay there, staring at the darkness of the ceiling. It was late. The day had been more than exhausting, and yet my mind wouldn’t stop. I had no idea what to do, but I needed to do something. How was I going to reach Falin? I considered calling my father and seeing if he would help me, but I doubted he would. If he’d been willing to contact Faerie for me, he likely would have offered when I’d seen him earlier. And even if he were willing, I doubted he’d contact Falin for me. He seemed to hate the knight-turned-king for reasons he’d never expounded upon and he’d been more than willing to accept the locked doors to mean Falin had lost the throne. No, my father would likely contact Dugan . . .
I sat up in bed. Dugan owed me no small amount of favors, and I didn’t need my father’s help to try to contact the Shadow Prince. He’d told me once that every secret made its way to the shadowed halls. That there were fae in the court who did nothing but listen to the secrets that were whispered in darkness. I’d tried calling for Dugan before, the last time the winter court had locked, and he hadn’t come. But, to be fair, his own court was dealing with a lot at the time, and Nekros had been as locked as the door to Faerie. I had no idea if that was the case this time, or if Faerie pulling out of Nekros would also sever the ties from darkness to the shadow court, but it couldn’t hurt to try.
I flipped on a lamp so that the room was cast in an artificial orange glow that made all the shadows grow long and dark. Then I climbed out of bed, looking for the deepest of the shadows. With my bad eyes, they all looked pretty deep, but the corner of