finished, his eyes darted my way, shoulders tense, as if bracing himself. Then he relaxed.
“Better?” I said.
He nodded. “Thank you.”
“You’ll have to uncast it when they come back, so you remember who I’m supposed to be. So when did Jaime get here?”
“This morning. Savannah, of course, was thrilled to see her, and Paige and I—” He shook his head. “We were just as happy, thinking it was exactly what Savannah needed, how thoughtful it was…” Another sharp shake of his head.
“She didn’t seem at all…odd?”
“Had it been anyone else, I’m sure I would have thought so. But Jaime’s moods—and behavior—can be…erratic. She called after she heard about the shooting, and was concerned about Savannah, so for her to get a sudden notion to visit wasn’t abnormal, not for Jaime.”
He looked back at the keys in my hand. I clasped my hand around them, hiding them.
“Trust me,” I said. “I want to go after her at least as much as you do, but so long as you don’t have the keys, and I can’t drive a motorcycle, we’re pretty darned safe. So where’d they go? Will they be gone long?”
“They’re just going to the video store, and picking up a few groceries. They should be back any moment.” He walked out of the lean-to, and peered down the driveway. “Perhaps I should call on my cell—”
“Good idea. Tell them you forgot you’re out of milk or something.”
He nodded and called. From his voice, I knew he’d phoned Savannah. I don’t think I could have made that call without betraying something, if not screaming for her to get out of the car and run back here as fast as she could. Lucas handled it as calmly as if he’d really been calling to ask her to pick up something else.
“She’s fine,” he said when he hung up. “They’re finishing up at the store now, meaning we have about ten minutes to devise a plan.”
We came up with a decent basic premise. Well, Lucas came up with most of it, but that was his thing, so I left him to it and refined as necessary. It was still impossible to plot a complete strategy like “when she comes in the house, you send her upstairs, and I’ll hide, then…”
The moment the Nix realized she’d been led into a trap, she’d jump free from Jaime’s body. So the mortal blow had to come as a surprise. Or, as we decided, maybe not as such a surprise. There was one time when we could battle the Nix without her realizing what was happening and leap clear: when she was the one who initiated the fight. In other words, we had to wait until she made her move to kill one of us. She’d expect us to fight then.
“Quickly,” he said, as the car sounded in the drive. “Get upstairs, back into Paige’s office, and close the door. I’ll tell them that a client’s Web site crashed, and you’re not to be disturbed. I’ll bring dinner up—”
“Whoa, hold on. If I hide out in the office, the Nix will probably need to change her plans.”
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take.”
“But the longer it takes her, the longer I’ll be here.”
He paused. “I’ll call you down for dinner. But say as little as possible. I’ll steer conversation in another direction. After dinner, we’ll…we’ll watch the video they picked out.” He nodded. “Yes, that’s perfect. You won’t need to talk.”
“Hey, just because I can’t fool you doesn’t mean I can’t pull off a damned good Paige impersonation.”
He looked at me.
“Er, a pretty good one,” I said.
He kept looking at me.
“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
A car door slammed. Savannah called something. I hesitated, but Lucas uncast the glamour spell, then opened the back door and shoved me inside.
I spent the first thirty minutes in Paige’s office browsing through the stuff on her computer. I wasn’t being nosy. I had nothing better to do. Okay, maybe I was being nosy…just a little. After a half hour, though, Lucas popped in to check on me and asked me, very politely, not to mess with Paige’s stuff, shutting down her e-mail and other windows, and leaving open only two—solitaire and some file that looked like programming stuff. If Savannah or the Nix came by accidentally, I could switch from the game to the work, and at least look busy. Not that I could actually do anything with the programming code. Lucas had locked it into a read-only file. Geez, you’d think