"You'll end up with glass in your paws." The stack of boxes nearest the desk was the only one that had been disturbed.
Five or six boxes had been knocked around, spilling their contents on the floor.
"No blood here," I told him, and tried not to be relieved.
I did not want to discover Phin's body.
Not while I was alone with Sam, the wolf.
"They were just looking--and not very seriously at that.
Maybe they were interrupted, or this is how far they got when Phin finally broke down and started to talk." "Fee fie foe feral," said a man's voice, hitting my ears like the blast of a barge's horn.
"I smell the blood of a little girl." He rhymed "girl" with "feral," something only possible because of his cockney-accented English.
"Be she hot, be she cold, I'll wager this, me lads--she won't get more old." All I could see was two feet on the stairs.
I'd had no warning that the man was in the building at all--and from Sam's sudden movement, he hadn't heard or smelled anything either.
I had no idea that fae could hide themselves like that.
No telling whether he'd been there all the time, or if he'd followed us in.
The fae was wearing big, black boots, the kind that should go clomp-clomp-clomp.
And he was in no hurry to come down and kill us--which told me that he was one of the kind that enjoyed the hunt.
He wasn't a giant, despite my facetious naming of the two forest fae, because the giants were beast-minded, more instinct than intelligent.
The beast-minded fae who had survived the rise of metalwielding humans had died at the hands of the Gray Lords.
Instinctive behaviors weren't good enough to make sure you'd hide your nature from the humans, and for centuries the fae had tried to pretend that they had never existed outside of folklore and fairy tales.
But from the size of those feet, he was big enough.
Sam caught my attention by bumping his head against my hip--then ducked under the desk.
He planned on taking the fae by surprise.
Good to know Sam was still with me.
"That's possibly the worst doggerel verse I've heard since I was thirteen and wrote a poem for an English assignment," I told the waiting fae as I walked around so I could look up the stairs.
The one who stood at the top of the stairs was maybe six feet or a little under, though his feet were five inches longer than I've ever seen on any normal human.
He had curly red hair and a pleasantly cheerful face--if you didn't look too hard at his eyes.
He was wearing slacks and a red shirt with a blue tie that matched the red canvas apron that covered his clothes.
Embroidered across the top of the apron was the name of a grocery store.
In his right hand he held a butcher knife.
He smelled of the iron and sweetness that was blood, with an undertone that made him the second of the Jolly Green Giants who'd trashed the place.
The damned strong one who'd hefted a filled bookcase.
"Ah," he said, "a hintruder.