"And he's not going to listen to me anyway.
Let's get this done as fast as possible." Zee had moved the chairs around in the office, pulling them out of their usual line so that three of them were facing one another--all that was missing was a kitchen table.
When he saw Jesse with me, he looked a little surprised but pulled out another chair.
"I'm the facilitator," Jesse explained.
"She can talk to me instead of you." I wasn't surprised to see that Zee's companion was the older woman from the bookstore--though I wouldn't have been surprised to see a complete stranger either.
She was subtly different from the grandmotherly woman I'd met earlier.
The kind of difference that made Little Red Riding Hood say, "What big teeth you have, Grandmother." "Mercy," Zee said, "you may call this woman Alicia Brewster.
Alicia, this is Mercedes Thompson and"--he paused--"Jesse." He gave me a look.
"I hope you know what you're doing," he said.
"Having her here will speed things up," I said.
"When we're finished, she's going home." "All right," he said, and sat down next to Alicia.
"You came to my grandson's store looking for him," the fae woman said to me without acknowledging the introductions.
"And to return what you'd borrowed." I looked at Jesse.
"When I saw Alicia at Phin's store, I was trying to bring Phin's book back to him.
He'd called Tad-- Zee's son--to have him ask me to take care of it.
It was odd, that phone call, and the fae who'd moved in next door to Phin was odder.
By the time I got to the bookstore, I was ready to believe that there was a problem.
When I saw Alicia at the counter, and she couldn't tell me anything about where Phin was or when he was coming back, I decided that I wasn't going to give her the book to return to him.
I also decided that someone needed to see if they could figure out where Phin was." "So you came back at night and looked for him at the store?" "I thought," I said to Jesse, "that we were coming here to find out where Gabriel is and how to rescue him." "And I choose to ask questions of you first so that I may decide how much I want to tell you," Alicia said.
That implied heavily that if I chose not to answer her questions, she'd tell us nothing.
If she knew anything.
I looked at Zee, who shrugged and lifted his hands an inch off his lap--he had no influence with her.
My other option was to wait for the fairy queen's call.
"All right," I told Jesse.
"You already know that Sam and I went to check out the bookstore at night to find out if something happened to Phin.
We found that his store had been trashed by a water fae and two forest fae of some sort." "There was a glamour in the store," said Alicia.
"A strong glamour that I couldn't penetrate, though I knew it was there.
I was so afraid that my grandson's body was lying next to me, and I could not sense it." "There's a cost for magic," said Zee, folding his age-spotted hands over his little potbelly.
"Glamour has less than most now, but there is still a cost for sight and sound, a cost for physical dimensions.
There are few fae with good noses, so less effort is spent there and more on the other senses.